Pissing Contest

We haz one.  I sent this off to the Mediscare folks today...

So, here's me, blissfully cruising along through life with my spiffy lil portable oxygen generator until two weeks ago when that referenced "Summary Notice" from Mediscare showed up in my snail-mail box.  I have more than a few issues here, first and foremost being the non-payment for my O₂ machine; the second being the fact I wasn't informed of the non-payment issue when it first began, with the bureaucrats waiting over six months to inform me via a "summary notice;" and the third being the date of the summary notice versus the date I actually RECEIVED the damned thing.  I'm not exactly a Happy Camper at the moment.

Oh, well.  We took the shot across our bow and replied in kind.  I had to go see my doctor last week to obtain copies of all the communications in this CF and the strange thing?  She was NOT surprised, in the least, and was slightly amused that I was.  I have to give props to American HomePatient for leaving my machine alone in the face of non-payment.  One wonders how long that will last.

It's always sumthin'.

Heh.

There are a few more on this subject at the Usual Source o' these things.

The Non-Essential Sunny

Heh.

BAU

"Truer words," and all that.  Most of this "shutdown" has the look and feel of a particularly inept PR campaign gone very wrong.

I'm Not the First or the Only Person to Ask, But...

... if these people workin' for the gub'mint are "non-essential," why were they ever hired in the first place?

Amen

Yeah, What a GREAT Ideer This Is!

I'm bein' sarcastic, in case ya didn't notice, but the Heritage Foundation isn't:

The rule now, if you order from Amazon or any other website, is simple: Your items are taxed only if the retailer has a physical store or warehouse in the state where you live — a bricks-and-mortar presence, to use the industry lingo. If you live, say, in New York and you order from a retailer who is based entirely in California, you pay no sales tax.

That would change dramatically under the Marketplace Fairness Act. Every time you bought something online, you would be charged taxes you don’t have to pay now.

It’s worse if you are a merchant — and, let’s face it, with the rise of sites such as eBay, nearly all of us are at one time or another. It’s not just large retailers such as Amazon that would have to assess these taxes. Any retailer with more than $1 million in sales would have to collect sales taxes.

The relative simplicity of selling something online suddenly would get a lot more complicated. Sorting through the tax codes of 9,646 jurisdictions in the United States would be no easy task. At one per state, retailers would have to complete and file 46 state tax returns. Who wants to take a chance on making a tax-related mistake?

“How can we possibly know the tax rates in [those] jurisdictions?” said Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. “In one jurisdiction, cotton candy is food; in another, it’s entertainment or candy.” Anyone who has ever tried to fill out a simple tax form knows how ludicrously complex it can get.

RTWT.  Call your congresscritters.

We Are Pissed

I did my 2012 taxes this afternoon, seein' as how we were in receipt of our final outstanding 1099s a couple o' few days ago (that would be sometime around the 20th of this month), and we are shocked.  There have been numerous articles published in the press and elsewhere to the effect that roughly half of all Americans don't pay ANY income tax.  Here's an excerpt from one such article:

1) About 46.4 percent of U.S. households didn’t pay federal income taxes in 2011. Mitt Romney’s right about that.

(Tax Policy Center)

So there's that, for starters, and I am NOT in that 46.4% of Americans who pay no income tax.  Imagine my surprise and disgust that, after about three hours of labor-intensive tax preparation, I find I have to write checks to both the Feds and the State o' New Mexico, the latter of which will ding my bank account to the tune o' just slightly less than one thousand Yankee Dollars... and that's after deducting about 15 grand in uncompensated medical expenses.  I find it both interesting and troubling that a person living on a pittance of pensions from a military retirement, private pension plan, and Social Security  pays that goddamned much (85% of said SS payments are taxable, go figure, as is all of both my other pensions). I don't mind paying my fair share... but what the feds and the State o' New Mexico consider "fair" and what **I** think is fair are widely divergent.

Yeah, I know... First World Problems... we has 'em. I suppose I shouldn't bitch, piss, and moan, mainly because I'm blessed that I live in the USofA and not somewhere else. Still and even... I don't get it.  I must not be doin' sumthin' right.

O! The Humanity!

" ...it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It's smoke, and it's flames now ... and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring-mast. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers screaming around here. I told you, I can't even talk to people whose friends are on there. Ah! It's–it's–it's–it's ... o–ohhh! I–I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's just laying there, a mass of smoking wreckage."

Don't recognize the quote?  Go here.

Dark Days

There were quite a few items about the effects of the looming sequestration action in today's Usual USAF Source.  Here are two:

Second-Rate Power: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday issued some dire warnings to lawmakers on sequestration during what will likely be his last time testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee before he steps down from the post. During the Feb. 7 oversight hearing, Panetta reiterated claims that the budget sequester would bring about a "terrible readiness crisis," and said the erosion of US military capabilities inevitably resulting from the across-the-board spending cuts would turn the United States "into a second-rate power." In addition, Pentagon leaders would be forced "to throw out" the nation's most recent defense strategy, he said. "My preference, frankly, is that the Congress would do the big deal. Get it done. Get this behind us, de-trigger sequester, [and] stop this constant uncertainty, this month-to-month situation where we don't know what the hell we're going to get," said Panetta. He is expected to retire later this month, pending the confirmation of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as his replacement. However, the committee chose not to vote on Hagel's nomination at Thursday's hearing, following a request from some GOP members for more time to receive additional information they've requested on Hagel. The committee had not set a new date for the vote, as of Thursday. (See also Controversial Nomination.)

—Amy McCullough

Sequestration Blues: Profound readiness decay, billions in unexpected costs, an unrecoverable maintenance backlog, and potential large-scale reductions in force are among the many predictable problems awaiting the Air Force if Congress fails to stop the looming budget sequester from taking effect in March and/or pass a budget for Fiscal 2013, said senior service officials on Thursday. At a press roundtable in the Pentagon, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Larry Spencer said: "As things stand today, we don't know how much money we will have to operate the Air Force, and we don't know when we will find out. But we do know sequestration will mean Air Force people will not be adequately trained, and will lack the equipment they need." Acting Air Force Undersecretary Jamie Morin said the Air Force's share of the Fiscal 2013 sequester hit would be $12.4 billion—not including another $1.8 billion in shortfalls from the overseas contingency operations accounts—and the Air Force would have to reduce spending that much in just six months. Flying hours would plummet; only those units in or going to war would get their requisite hours, leaving many units idle for as much as three months, said Morin during the Feb. 7 roundtable. After just 30 days of inactivity, "essentially all" functions in a unit—pilots, maintainers, loaders, fuelers, etc.—would be "non-mission-capable." and it would take a long time to get them back up to par, he pointed out. Spencer noted that the sequester problem just starts in Fiscal 2013; more years of sequestrations could come, and that would compel the Air Force to start thinking about a reduction in force to "balance" people with the equipment and funds available. Meanwhile, Morin said, the American people haven't signaled they want their Air Force to do fewer missions.

—John A. Tirpak

None of that sounds promising, it's all doom and gloom.   I'm generally an optimist about America and her prospects but this bullshit is really wearing me down.

And then there's this... or rather, these:

Heh.  Brings new meaning to the ol' "you can run but you sure can't hide."  Mebbe the sequester will ground the drones.

In other news... a couple o' folks have noted they're having difficulty leaving comments here at EIP.  I did some snooping around and the kind folks at Blogger had this to say about that:

Thursday, August 18, 2011

We have received reports from users not being able to create or edit posts. We are working on fixing this. In the meantime, you can change your language settings to English as a workaround. Thanks for your patience.

Update, 9:45AM PST: This has been fixed, thanks for your patience.

A comment MIGHT could qualify as a post and the issues could be related.  I'd appreciate an off-line if you have problems commenting. 

Update:  The perils of writing when not fully caffeinated are apparent above.  Note the date on that Blogger status message.  Fuckin' Blogger.  You can take that to mean both the software AND the guy using it.

WTF!?!

So there I was, getting ready to watch Notre Dame kick the Hell outta Michigan... in South Bend... and I pulled the teevee guide up to make sure I had the right channel.  And got THIS:

WTF, KAMR?  WHAT THE FUCK are you THINKING!?!  West Texas A&M?  Incarnate WORD?  What the Hell is that, some sorta religious experience?  The only religious experience I want right now is to see Touchdown Jesus smilin' down on the Irish.

Save me.

Headline...

... in The Daily Mail:

Pakistani man dies after inhaling fumes from burning American flags at anti-Islam film rally

Heh.  Congrats to the manufacturer of that poisonous US flag... may we have another lots more, please?

Some Days You Just Can't Win

We're just back from our bi-weekly beer and commissary run out to Cannon Airplane Patch and we were looking forward to another episode of "Broadening Our Horizons" with a Lips of Faith Sour Brown Ale which looks like the pic on the right, below.  But we won't be able to do so because of the weirdest turn of events.  To wit, this:

That, Gentle Reader, is a hole right DEAD center in the bottle cap.  I loaded the beer right up close to the passenger compartment firewall in the trunk, as I always do.  I felt a slight "ping" when I shut the trunk lid but thought nothing of it... until I got home and began unloading my groceries.  I noticed the trunk smelled a lot like beer and I had the briefest "uh-oh" sort of thought.  But a cursory examination revealed no broken bottles in the bags... so where was the smell coming from?  

All was revealed once I got indoors.  Apparently the hinge pin on the trunk latch caught the bottle of La Folie right dead center in the bottle cap, punching a neat lil hole in it.  Although the bottle remained upright during the trip home, the to and fro motion of my exuberant driving was enough to cause half of the bottle's contents to leak into the bag it was in, along with a significant amount which leaked out of the bag and on to the trunk's carpeting.  Sigh.

Well, that's that.  I'm afraid to drink the beer for fear there might be small glass particles therein.  So... it looks like I just threw away 14 Yankee dollars.  It sure smelled good, tho.

Update, 1338 hrs:  I decided to drink what was left, after all.  I uncapped the bottle and felt around the lip to find no jagged edges, so I think I'm safe.  It's pretty danged good, even considering the fact I'm drinking it at room temperature.  That's no big deal... we DID live in Ol' Blighty for three years.

We're (Not) Flyin' Now!

Charles Krauthammer is good today.  He's good every day but today's piece really hits the mark.  If I was one of those guys who do a "quote of the day" thing then this would certainly be in the running:

Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

There's much more at the link, of course.  As a s'matter of fact, the whole TSA scanner/feel-you-up thing is garnering more press than just about anything else these days, with good reason.  Everyone and their Mom is weighing in on the subject, and Red Eye is having a field day with it.  Yesterday Megan McCardle wrote a public Dear John letter to United, Delta, and American Airlines advising the companies she was "leaving them."  And in so doing she mentioned the fact she had already left.

That would make two (or more) of us.  You Gentle Readers know that I opted to drive out to South Carolina and Pennsylvania this past summer rather than fly.  I believe I mentioned at the time my primary reason for doing so was my complete and total hatred for the TSA and the hassle our benevolent gub'mint has brought down on our heads just because we're presumptuous enough to want to fly somewhere.  

This latest brouhaha only strengthens my resolve to never frickin' fly again.  Ever.  I have the luxury of choosing my mode of travel these days as I have much more time than money in retirement.  I'm thankful I'm no longer part of the bid'niz travel community and my heart gives thanks for that happy circumstance, too.  I'd be a member of the perpetually aggrieved class were I still in frequent flier mode and the resulting stress would NOT be good for my poor aged heart.

We'll close by quoting Dr. Krauthammer once again.

This time you have gone too far, Big Bro'. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don't touch my junk. 

What he said.

I Got Nuthin'

Well, except for this (caution: lotsa F-bombs and various other unpleasantness):

Jesse Ventura might be a former SEAL and a former governor but he's also a world-class asshat.  And what prompted me to post this lil bit of unpleasantness, you may ask?  Ah, just a lil sumthin' blog-bud Morgan put up today, which fired off my synapses.  I saw an abbreviated version of the above on Red Eye a few nights ago.

You could have had a re-run, yanno?  Which might have been better'n this, at the risk of flattering myself.  Or not.

Beer me!

I'm An Eco-Criminal. You Are, Too.

Although this article in New Scientist is UK-centric (written by Scots climate scientist (hunh?) David Reay), you might find "Five eco-crimes we commit every day" entertaining... if you get off on enviro-weenie misanthropic bombast. But there is humor there, of course.  And as you might expect... I'm guilty of numerous eco-crimes, including Numero Uno on Reay's eco-misdemeanor hit parade:

1 Coffee

(blah blah blah)

But the average cup of black filter coffee is still responsible for 125 grams of CO₂ emissions. Of this, two-thirds comes from production and most of the rest from brewing.

Opting for the more prosaic joys of instant coffee reduces that figure to around 80 grams. Yet that still means a six-a-day caffeine habit clocks up more than 175 kilograms of CO₂ each year. That's the equivalent of a flight across Europe - from London to Rome, say. Add milk, and the methane belched by dairy cows means you increase your coffee's climate-changing emissions by more than a third.

It doesn't end there, though. The environmental group WWF has calculated that it takes 200 litres of water to produce the coffee, milk, sugar and cup for just one regular takeout latte. So if everyone ditched their pre-work coffee fix that would do wonders for the planet.

Holy Crap!  I had NO ideer about the Gaia-pillage I'm responsible for!  I suppose I can disregard the last graf since I brew my 12 cups per day (minimum) at home, thus dispensing with at least four paper cups I'd need to hold that amount of eeevil brew if bought at Starbucks.  

But...assuming there's no statute of limitations on eco-crimes,
and why would there be?... I'm in deep kimchee for past offenses.  Said offenses being four grandes (that's "medium," in Starbucks-speak) every day, five days a week (and some Saturdays),  for two and a half years.  At a minimum.  Well, there are mitigating circumstances... coz I drank straight coffee and didn't do the lattes and caramel macchiato stuff... so deduct points accordingly.  That reduces the severity of the offense(s) considerably, I would think.  Except I'm still at least partly responsible for Juan Valdez and his cute little burro's eco-felonies.  I'm one of his chief accomplices.  He's grateful, too.

One more thing... who the Hell has time to calculate the environmental impact of  producing "the coffee, milk, sugar and cup for just one regular takeout latte?"  And what methods do they use?  Can I see the raw data?  What?  They threw it OUT?  Bastards!  I can't BELIEVE they did that!

Now ask me if I intend to quit.  And then there's...

5 Food wastage


Of all the facets of overconsumption that plague both human society and the global environment, food wastage is the most shocking. US households throw away around 30 per cent of their food, worth $48 billion every year. Similar levels of wastage are seen in Europe. In the UK, some 6.7 million tonnes of food is binned annually. Most of this joins the layers of unwanted clothing in landfill sites, where it decomposes, emitting the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Potatoes top the pile, with 359,000 tonnes going uneaten each year. Bread and apples are not far behind. Meat and fish are next, accounting for over 160,000 tonnes, followed by 78,000 tonnes of cooked rice and pasta. A staggering 4.8 billion grapes go the same way, as do 480 million yogurts and 200 million rashers of bacon. The annual cost to UK consumers of all this waste is £10 billion and the cost to the environment is the equivalent of an extra 15 million tonnes of CO₂ (The Food We Waste, WRAP, 2008; bit.ly/urUFj).

The cost of food wastage reverberates down the supply chain, increasing requirements for storage, transport and packaging. But the biggest impact by far comes in food production. For almost all the food we buy, the bulk of its greenhouse gas emissions arise here. This is especially true for meat and dairy produce. For example, 40,200 tonnes of milk are wasted each year in the UK, adding up to the equivalent of 40,000 tonnes of CO₂. This is comparable to the annual CO₂ emissions of 10,000 cars, or of flying 30,000 people from London to New York and back.

(blah blah blah)

Wasting food has always been an issue, to get serious for a moment.  I am ashamed at the amount of food I let spoil before I get around to consuming it. That said, I'm thinking it would cost quite a bit more for me to pack up my spoilage (before it goes bad, as if I would or could think that far ahead) and ship it off to Bangladesh or some other deprived third-world country... in both absolute (read as: shipping costs) and eco terms (read as: yet another gazillion tons of emissions and the addition to my carbon footprint).  And Mom's admonishment isn't lost on me, either: "Clean your plate! Think of all the starving kids in China!" (Chinese kids apparently have become well-fed since I was growing up; we worry about Bangladeshi and African kids now).  But how many millions of obese children are running around the US because Mom's concerned about the Bangladeshi?  Think about that!  I submit throwing out some food is preferable to the epidemic of juvenile diabetes and other overeating debilities... not to mention the aesthetics of adding more fat people to the population.  Oops. Major digression.

Still and even, I remain astounded that eco-weenies actually calculate the amount of methane emitted by decomposing food in landfills, among other things... like counting up 4.8 billion wasted grapes or weighing the aggragate amount of thrown out potatoes.  Sure they do.  I've seen 'em standing at the entrance to Waste Management plants/sites with their scales and clipboards, rummaging through every garbage truck that comes in.  More amazing is these numbers are presented as absolute fact, not "estimates" or in other  rational terms.  We're expected to believe this stuff?  Really? 

So... there's more, of course.  Own a widescreen teevee?  Eco-criminal!  Ever bought a plug-in air freshener or sat under a patio heater?  Gaia-raper!  And you people who let your kids take the Playstation along on road trips or opted for a factory-installed system in your (gasp!) SUV are due for a comeuppance, too.  You defilers, you!

I'm not making ANY of this up.  Chase the link and be amazed.

Add My Voice...

... to the incredible outrage over yesterday's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed & Co will be tried in New York for the 9/11 atrocities.  I can't say I was surprised at AG Holder's announcement yesterday... no, I was merely sickened, most especially with all his bullshit about "faith in the American justice system" and the like.  Me and about 150 million others, including the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Please spare us talk of the "rule of law." If that was the primary consideration, the U.S. already has a judicial process in place. The current special military tribunals were created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which was adopted with bipartisan Congressional support after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision obliged the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal "enemy combatants" captured since 9/11.

Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren't a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence. Eight Nazis who snuck into the U.S. in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and most were hanged within two months. Before the Obama Administration stopped all proceedings earlier this year pending yesterday's decision, the tribunals at Gitmo had earned a reputation for fairness and independence.

As it happens, Mr. Holder acknowledged their worth himself by announcing that the Guantanamo detainee who allegedly planned the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen and four others would face military commission trials. (The Pentagon must now find a locale other than the multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art facility at Gitmo for its tribunal.)

Why the difference? Mr. Holder seemed to suggest that the Cole bombers struck a military target overseas and thus are a good fit for a military trial, while KSM and comrades hit the U.S. and murdered civilians and thus deserve a U.S. civilian trial. But this entirely misunderstands that both groups are unlawful enemy combatants who are accused of war crimes, whatever their targets. Mr. Holder's justification betrays not a legal consistency but a fundamentally political judgment that he can make as he sees fit.

A political judgment indeed.  The far left now has its retributive sop for the Bush-Cheney "war crimes" and the show is only just beginning.  Andy McCarthy of National Review sums up the situation quite nicely:

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Mr. McCarthy knows from whence he speaks... he led the 1995 prosecution against the original World Trade Center bombers.  

There's just so much to dislike disagree with hate about yesterday's decision it's difficult to know where to begin with the hatin'.  A great place to start would be with The One himself who, in typical fashion, assumed a low profile ("present!") by being out of the country when the announcement was made.  He owns this mess... assuming Harry Truman's "the buck stops here" presidential maxim still applies.

Elections have consequences.  Bring on the Buyer's Remorse, shall we?

Well, THAT'S Gonna Leave a Mark...

Jules Crittenden writing about the AP report that The One has rejected all the Afghanistan "options" presented to him so far... and ordered his National Security folks to serve up "other options:"

OK, I get that the political piece is vitally important, and for Eikenberry (ed: US ambassador to The Af), up to his armpits in scheming warlords and bureaucrats in Kabul with his frontline diplomats daily engaged in pitched and desperate note-passing against an entrenched corruptancy, the light at the top of his own well probably is awfully dim and far away. This is a highly complex situation. Thinking outside the box, maybe it does make sense to put the cart ahead of the horse. It is intriguing, though, that in the middle of a hot war in which a determined, murderous enemy is making gains, there are ”options beyond military planning” that are so pressing that they actually trump military planning.  Sounds like the president, in a show of resolve, wants to signal more firmly to Karzai and the scheming warlords that the United States is prepared to hold its breath until the Afghan people turn blue, or that the United States might even take its bat and ball and go home. Also, to signal to the United States military that he won’t be pushed around if it kills them.

One bright spot, in the Vietnam avoidance agenda. Remember how they accused LBJ of picking targets from the Oval Office? Can’t accuse Obama of that. He’s actively not picking targets from the Oval Office.

In the meantime, our Ditherer-in-Chief is jetting off to Beijing to try and convince the Chinese they should finance his health plan, his economic stimuli, and his other assorted pricey pet rocks.  And further in the meantime, our troops in The Af won't get the resources their commander asked for BACK IN AUGUST, a request which the military establishment... including the SecDef and CENTCOM commander... supports.  Amazing, innit?

But... you should go read Mr. Crittenden.  The man is frickin' spot-on.

Bad News, Good News

First the bad news... which you already know unless you're currently under your favorite big-ass rock or in a coma:

WASHINGTON – In a tight vote, the House passed its sweeping health bill late Saturday, marking the biggest victory yet for Democrats in their drive to create near-universal health insurance.

[...]

Its passage moves Congress closer to the biggest expansion of the social safety net since the Medicare insurance program for the elderly was created in 1965. The measure spends $1.01 trillion over a decade to provide health insurance to an additional 36 million Americans and creates a new public insurance plan to compete with private insurers by 2013. It requires most Americans to carry insurance, creates a new exchange where they can shop for it and gives the lowest earners tax credits to help them pay for it.

A little over one trillion dollars, depending on who you believe*!  The prudent among us have to ask:  where the HELL is that money coming from?  I suppose "prudent" would disqualify all but 39 Democrats in the House, the remainder of which evidently don't understand what a massive increase in gub'mint debt means for the future of the nation and every single individual living in these United States or they don't care.  The situation is appalling, in either case. 

The astute may wonder why my rant focuses on "debt."  What else could it possibly BE... considering we have about $107 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities?  But, Hell... I suppose another two or three trillion dollars ain't much to add... (/sarcasm)


So... the good news.  I don't have a link for you, but I just now watched Senator Joe Lieberman on Fox News Sunday and he said... unequivocally... that he cannot and will not support the House bill as long as it contains a "public option" for the exact reason mentioned above: an unconscionable increase in the public debt.  I might be wrong here, but I'm quite sure he said he would not allow a bill with a public option to come to a vote on the Senate floor.  And that is good news, indeed.  Let us pray.


* The Heritage Foundation thinks Pelosi's monstrosity will cost 2.6 trillion dollars. 


Update, 1710 hrs:  I heard Senator Lieberman correctly:



Good on ya, Joe.

Oh, Goodie

Heads up, you vets... and maybe even active duty folks, too.  From DarkReading, via a tweet from cyberwar:

A defective hard drive containing the personal information of some 70 million U.S. military personnel was returned to a contractor for repair and recycling -- without being erased first, according to a news report.

According to a report in Wired.com, the inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach of a hard drive that helped power eVetRecs, the system veterans use to request copies of their health records and discharge papers.

When the drive failed last November, the agency returned the drive to the contractor, GMRI, which sold it to them, for repair. GMRI determined it couldn't be fixed, and ultimately passed it to another firm to be recycled. But Hank Bellomy, a NARA IT manager who reported the incident to the inspector general, told Wired.com that the drive was not properly erased.
 

"This is the single largest release of personally identifiable information by the government ever," Bellomy told Wired.com. "When the USDA did the same thing, they provided credit monitoring for all their employees. We leaked 70 million records, and no one has heard a word of it."

NARA says the lost drive is not a problem because its contractors signed privacy promises in their contracts. A spokesperson told Wired.com that the agency "does not believe that a breach of PII occurred," according to the report.

The drive was part of a RAID array of six drives containing an Oracle database that held detailed records on 76 million veterans, including millions of Social Security numbers dating to 1972, the report says.

Bellomy told Wired.com that when the unencrypted drive failed, he tried to subvert the longstanding recycling policy by hiding the drive in his safe. But it was taken out of his control when he was put on long-term leave, he said. He also said that more drives failed after the November incident, and that he performed a forensic scan on them to prove they were full of sensitive data.

As if I didn't have enough to worry about...