† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: There is one business that is recession-proof: auto repossession – which, in a cruel irony, is also known as “recovery.” Though nearly two million cars were repossessed last year, “recovery businesses are trying to do more with less, taking advantage of computers and digital imaging,” reports The New York Times:

 

They are improving efficiency and reducing the need for tedious legwork in tracking skips - those delinquent borrowers who are the hardest to find - using technologies like automatic license plate recognition, which allows them to troll city streets and instantly identify cars whose loans are in arrears. …

 

At the core of this technology-intensive trend is a set of high-speed digital cameras mounted on the hood and trunk of a vehicle that snap pictures of license plates while passing other vehicles, even at 80 miles per hour. Photos of the plates (including the time the photo was taken and the car’s GPS coordinates) instantly pop up on a laptop computer inside the repo man’s vehicle. Optical character recognition software converts the plate numbers to text.

 

The process gets more technical: the plate numbers are checked against an encrypted database of delinquent cars, compiled from lenders and stored on the computer, which is refreshed continuously using a wireless link. … [W]hen a plate on a wanted list is found, the computer screen displays further information, including the make and model, its vehicle identification number, or VIN, and the name of the lender. The data is used to confirm that the right car has been found - scofflaws sometimes swap license plates, for instance.

 

If the car is parked, a tow truck can be called in; if not, the repo man can follow the car and, with luck and tact, negotiate a handover when the driver parks.

 

† Obama – Not McCain - Will Be Bush III: President Barack Hussein Obama signed a one-year extension of key provisions of the counterterrorism law, the USA Patriot Act, that would have expired yesterday, reports The Associated Press:

 

Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:

 

‡ Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

 

‡ Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

 

‡ Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

 

Meanwhile, The Washington Post laments that the U.S. Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which follows terror suspects via their financial transactions trail, is being targeted by the European Parliament over “bogus” privacy concerns – even though “[i]t was instrumental in 2006 in thwarting al-Qaeda plans to detonate liquid bombs on North American-bound flights from London's Heathrow Airport and critical in 2007 in helping to disrupt terrorism plots involving the Islamic Jihad Union”:

 

Since its inception the tracking program has had in place safeguards, including outside audits of all searches, to prevent abuse and invasions of privacy. Only the records of those already identified as terrorism suspects are in play. "Fishing expeditions" in which law enforcement officials troll for data to uncover terrorist connections are not permitted, nor is it legal to use the program to pursue non-terrorist crimes. A French judge appointed by the European Commission to review the program noted in a report released this year that privacy protections were robust and effective. …

 

The Obama administration should work with E.U. leaders to push for reconsideration. If need be, additional oversight should be considered. But the administration must not go too far. Gutting a legal and effective program for the sake of imagined privacy gains would be as unwise and potentially dangerous as having no program at all.

 

Let’s see how Obama – who fancies himself “president of the world” plays this.

† Media Irrelevancy – A Self-Inflicted Wound: Politico’s Michael Calderone takes the MSM to task for its failure to vet presidential candidate John Edwards, a “worrisome” failure when “politicians - be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office”:

 

The media, according to [presidential historian Michael Beschloss], now has “a much bigger responsibility than it used to.” In the past, he said, the political establishment “would usually have known the candidate for a long time, and if there were big problems, they probably would have known about those, and tried to make sure those people wouldn’t be nominated.”

 

That did not happen with Edwards, even though as a Senator he had run for president once before, in 2004, ended up on the Democratic ticket as John Kerry’s running mate, and was a known quantity to many top Democrats. …

 

Two stories by the National Enquirer that ran before Iowa described Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter. But the mainstream media went to sources within the Edwards campaign to try to confirm the stories and got nowhere. No one in the campaign would confirm them. …

 

The failure to follow up aggressively on the reporting by the National Enquirer, which has nominated itself for a Pulitzer Prize for its Edwards coverage, has served as fodder for conservatives and others convinced the media has a double standard when it comes to vetting Democrats and Republicans.

 

"I feel sorry for the liberals who were duped by Edwards,” said Cliff Kincaid editor of the right-leaning watchdog organization Accuracy in Media. “They were the real victims of the failure to vet Edwards.” …

 

Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said that there isn’t a “simple yes or no” answer when looking at whether Edwards was fully vetted. What news organizations can cover, he said, comes down to a question of resources.

 

“News organizations just don’t have the horsepower to go out when there’s fields of eight people in each party to do the level of vetting it would take to uncover that,” Lemann said of the Edwards affair. [Emphasis, The Stiletto]

 

Oh, really? An army of “investigative reporters and scandal-chasers” ran to AK to vet Gov. Sarah Palin after John McCain tapped her to be his running mate, and The Associated Press assigned no fewer than 11 staffers to fact-check her memoir, “Going Rogue.”

† Curves Make A Comeback (second item): The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan happily notes that “[t]he fashion industry - usually the whipping post for all that ails the culture, that cauldron of consumerism and the devil's spawn of narcissism - sent a commendably eclectic array of models down the New York runways this month.” She adds:

 

The women were more diverse in ethnicity, age and size. And for that, the industry should be cheered. …

 

[D]esigners have significantly broadened their definition of beauty, style and "It-ness." …

 

In hard times, it makes no sense to thoughtlessly alienate the women with the greatest resources to buy expensive frocks. …

 

The best thing to happen on the New York runways was that designers weren't using diversity to attract publicity, to advance a leitmotif or to be flamboyantly subversive. They simply decided that diversity looks good.

 

If this is the start of trend and not a fad, more models will soon look like “Mad Men” star Christina Hendricks.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): The Associated Press reports that “in places such as Sequoia National Park, or hidden high in the rugged-yet-fertile Sierra Nevada Mountains” Mexican drug gangs “are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them”: 

Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year. …

 

Growing marijuana in the U.S. saves traffickers the risk and expense of smuggling their product across the border and allows gangs to produce their crops closer to local markets.

 

Distribution also becomes less risky. Once the marijuana is harvested and dried on the hidden farms, drug gangs can drive it to major cities, where it is distributed to street dealers and sold along with pot that was grown in Mexico.

 

About the only risk to the Mexican growers, experts say, is that a stray hiker or hunter could stumble onto a hidden field.

 

Suppose you’re that stray hiker. Aren’t you glad that you can now pack heat to protect yourself, instead of wishing your licensed firearm wasn’t locked in a cabinet at home? You should be.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, “Daddy, What Causes Global Warming?”): The New York Times killed G-d only knows how many trees to give former Vice President Al Gore space for this op-ed justifying his continued belief in global warming even though the hacked E-mails at the heart of “Climategate” were akin to the Wizard of Oz exposed as being an ordinary man behind a curtain pushing buttons on a gizmo (emphasis throughout, The Stiletto):

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere - as if it were an open sewer.

 

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

 

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists - acting in good faith on the best information then available to them - probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea. …

 

[C]hanges in America’s political system - including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication - conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

 

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis - inconvenient as ever - must still be faced.

 

Notice how Gore minimizes scientific sloppiness - if not fraud or misconduct (fourth item) - at every turn. And considering that the MSM uncritically pushed the Global Warming Gospel, Gore’s complaint that the occasional agnostic was interviewed on an alternative media outlet only underscores the waning influence of this secular superstition. Finally, did Gore miss the 2008 election, when cap-and-trade advocates took over the executive and legislative branches of government?

 

To sum up Gore’s argument: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The Great Oz has spoken.”

 

Editorial Note: Gore closes with a bastardization of a Winston Churchill quote. RedStateNews sneers: “You figure the guy who invented the Internet could have found the right quote on Google.” Indeed.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Why We Need Gitmo): The U.S. Supreme Court threw out a case by seven Uighurs held at Gitmo for eight years who wanted to be relocated in the U.S. because no other country would take them after they had been cleared for release. Since their case was filed, the Chinese Muslims received offers to resettle in Switzerland, Palau and another country, and "[t]his change in the underlying facts may affect the legal issues presented," the court said.

 

The decision is a victory for the Executive Branch, because the high court took the case on to determine whether federal judges can order the Obama administration to release the detainees into the U.S. when Gitmo is shuttered, as promised. The Associated Press reports:

 

That issue drew considerable attention because it also could have affected the broader issue of whether any Guantanamo detainees - including those who cannot be brought to trial for various reasons but are considered too dangerous to be released - should be brought to the U.S. as President Barack Obama fulfills his promise to close the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. …

 

[T]he court sent their case back to the federal appeals court in Washington that previously ruled judges lacked the power to release the Guantanamo detainees inside the United States. The justices said in an unsigned opinion that the lower court should re-examine the case.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, “Person Of Interest” Steven Hatfill To Earn Lots Of Interest Income From Huge DOJ Payout): The Smoking Gun paged through the FBI files on government scientist Bruce Ivins, who was the main target of the agency’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks and unearthed these gems: He was a cross-dresser (his semen was detected on 15 pairs of women’s panties) who was “obsessed” with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority – also blindfolding and bondage – and wrote in a July 2008 E-mail that "Dick Cheney scares me … I am voting for Obama!" But what The Stiletto found the weirdest thing about this deeply strange little man is that he hated the NY Yankees. Good thing he didn’t send any anthrax to Jorge Posada (The Stiletto’s favorite Bronx Bomber) or any of his teammates.  

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Obama Administration Christmas Bomber Missteps Worse Than You Think): After an eight-month study by the Project on National Security Reform, a nonpartisan research and policy organization in Washington, a 196-page report commissioned by Congress finds that the National Counterterrorism Center is hampered by “systemic impediments” like “flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes,” reports The New York Times:

 

The findings come just weeks after the National Counterterrorism Center was criticized for missing clear warning signs that a 23-year-old Nigerian man was said to be plotting to blow up a Detroit-bound commercial airliner on Dec. 25. …

 

The center’s planning operation is supposed to be staffed by representatives of various agencies, but not all of them send their best and brightest, the report said [emphasis, The Stiletto]. It also cited examples in which the C.I.A. and the State Department did not even participate in some plans developed by the center that were later criticized for lacking important insights those agencies could offer. …

 

Under President Obama, the report determined, counterterrorism issues have become more decentralized within the National Security Council’s different directorates, leaving the counterterrorism center’s planning arm to collect and catalog policies and operations going on at the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the Departments of State and Homeland Security, rather than help shape overall government strategy.

 

The planning arm has not yet figured out good ways to measure the effectiveness of the steps the government is taking against extremists. “The basic but fundamental question remains unanswered: How is the United States doing in its attempt to counter terrorism?” the report concluded.

 

In response to the underwear bomber fiasco, the National Counterterrorism Center created the pursuit teams comprised of its “most capable analysts” to focus on threats from Yemen and Al Qaeda-affiliated entities. Based on this report, these teams will not be staffed by Columbos, but by Clouseaus.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (Obama Creating Green Jobs That Americans Won’t Do): Department of Energy’s Inspector General Gregory Friedman finds that President Barack Hussein Obama’s $5 billion program to put people to work and save heating costs by weatherizing the homes of low-income Americans has met less than 2 percent of the three-year goals to date, reports The New York Times:

 

“The job creation impact of what was considered to be one of the department’s most ‘shovel ready’ projects has not materialized,” the report said.

 

The assessment, issued a year after the weatherization program was created under the fiscal Recovery Act, comes as Congress moves toward passing a second bill to stimulate employment. Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over whether that second bill will add enough jobs in time to help revive the economy. …

 

Most of the weatherization projects involve improving insulation and replacing leaky windows and doors in the homes of low-income residents. …

 

Many states either furloughed the state employees who would administer such programs or instituted hiring freezes that prevented state offices from processing additional work - even though the federal government would have paid the additional salaries, the report found.

 

Another stumbling block was a decision by Congress to require contractors on the weatherization jobs to pay prevailing wages, the report said. … [M]most states did not begin hiring until the wage question was resolved last fall, the report said.

 

As a result, as of mid-February, one year into the stimulus plan, less than 8 percent of the money had been disbursed, the inspector general said.