« New garden blogs | Main | Jon Stewart to Host Oscars; Live and unreleased mp3s: Mitchell/Taylor, Lennon, Nyro, jazz »

January 4, 2006

Cheap Google PC? NBC's Andrea Mitchell wonders if CNN's Amanpour targeted by NSA spying; Abramoff exposed by partner's jilted fiancee? Eminent domain challenged in NOLA

Cheap PCs, anyone? L.A. Times

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars....

Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, will give a keynote address Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts suspect that Page will use the opportunity either to show off a Google computing device or announce a partnership with a big retailer to sell such a machine.

Both companies deny this, and common sense suggests a non-Windows, non-Mac computer will just baffle people. If the PC used the open-source Linux operating system, a lot of Windows programs won't work on it. Any chance this would be a PC that used Web versions of common software?

Reporter defends release of NSA spy program: James Risen says his sources are 'patriots,' CIA calls them 'unreliable' (5 pages) (one-page version that triggers printer): This is a transcript of an interview in which NBC's Andrea Mitchell quizzes the Times reporter who broke the story. Interesting question from insider Mitchell (wife of Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan), which indicates a level of concern about the spying program's breadth:

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christian Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

A veteran journalist like Mitchell wouldn't have just pulled that name out of the air. If journalists, White House political enemies and others were spied upon, the real reason for not getting warrants becomes apparent -- judges would have refused to go along with it.

Another interesting injection from Mitchell:

Mitchell: You described the president and George Tenet, discussing the interrogation of a particularly important prisoner, Abu Zabida. You describe what the president said to Tenant. What does that say?

Risen: As I say in the book, there's some dispute about whether this conversation took place, but what I was told by one particularly good source was that in discussing Abu Zabaida, who had been wounded right after his capture, and was being given medical treatment, that the president asked Tenet who authorized putting him on pain medication? Now there are people close to Tenet who say they've never heard that story, and don't believe it, which is what I say in the book, but it raises the question about the signals that the president was sending to the CIA and the military, about the way in which people should be treated in prisons. And even without that conversation it was pretty clear that the president had told or made it clear to the CIA that the gloves were to come off now, in going after al-Qaida...

Mitchell: Would it surprise you to know that at least one source says that that conversation was between Dick Cheney and George Tenet?

Risen: I haven't heard that. That's interesting.

Revenge of the jilted, bigtime? Raw Story reports (Jilted ex-fiancee turned in lobbyists to FBI) that the former fiancee of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's partner Michael Scanlon, Emily Miller, turned him in to the FBI:

In May 2004, Miller found herself at the center of attention when -- while live on air -- she ordered a cameraman for NBC's Meet the Press to stop filming Colin Powell. A copy of the transcript shows Miller, who also used to work as an NBC staffer, as a brusque press aide. Powell eventually ordered that the interview continue and asked Miller to step aside.

What many people didn't realize at the time, however, is that during the Powell interview Miller was upset because her fiancee, Michael Scanlon, had broken off their engagement, two of Miller's former State Department co-workers said. While still engaged to Miller, Scanlon had started an affair with a manicurist and broke up with Miller because he planned to marry the other woman, three of Scanlon's former associates at DeLay's office said. They added that the two had numerous public arguments.

But Miller had something on Scanlon. He confided in her all of his dealings with Abramoff, former colleagues said. She saw his emails and knew the intimate details of his lobbying work—work which is now the center of a criminal fraud investigation. After the breakup, Miller went to the FBI and told them everything about Scanlon's dealings with Abramoff, her coworkers added.

In turning him in, she became the agency's star witness against her former lover. Scanlon pled guilty in November and is cooperating with prosecutors; Abramoff reached a plea agreement today.

Scanlon and Miller met when both worked for Texas congressman Tom DeLay. Miller was press secretary. Scanlon, as communications director, was her boss.

A WaPo graphic follows the flow of money and influence.

(If he had left her for a lobbyist rather than a manicurist, would she have been so livid?)

Defending New Orleans: Common Ground Collective has been doing good things for a while now:

...We used this space to open the first distribution center in the 9th Ward in an effort to provide a beacon of hope amid the darkened and militarized streets and to address the needs of residents who were returning to an area with no services available. The center is open seven days a week offering goods, safety/protective gear, a free medical clinic, a housing advocacy/legal office, a tool lending library, a kitchen to prepare hot meals, a solar shower, and is often used as an alternative to the Orleans Parish Prison when law-enforcement or the National Guard pick homeless residents up for walking after dark in curfew hours. In addition to these services, the center has work crews that are dispatched daily to address the community's needs....

Now they're trying to prevent the seizure of property in the Lower Ninth ward by eminent domain:

Common Ground Collective(CGC) announces that it will lease and occupy a building in New Orleans' lower Ninth Ward. This is being done in defiance of the city's attempt to bulldoze that area in response to Hurricane Katrina's damage. In spite of a moratorium on bulldozing structures until January 6th, the City is in violation of its own stipulation, according to Brandon Darby, CGC's Ninth Ward Organizer and Coordinator.

Thanks to Eric Lilius for the tip.

Related: Eminent domain now big business. The Chicago Tribune reports on an 82-year-old woman whose home was taken by the city of Des Plaines, Ill., for a municipal parking lot -- but the land ended up with a Walgreen's drugstore on it.

Brain candy: 100 things we didn't know this time last year: BBC. Good trivia fodder. For instance,

35. The name Lego came from two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". It also means "I put together" in Latin.

They won't all make sense to Yanks, though: "86. Hecklers are so-called because of militant textile workers in Dundee."

For that explanation, Google turns up this item on Fact of the Day, which brims with these sorts of bonbons.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:25 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Tom Hoffman on January 4, 2006 11:49 AM

Posted by: Sheila on January 4, 2006 1:40 PM

Posted by: LastBaron on January 5, 2006 7:25 PM