From The Colbert Report:

If Congress doesn't reauthorize the Patriot Act, America's corporations are ready to step in.

TPM has more--How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?:

Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8 million requests for GPS data from a single wireless carrier in a year.

An increasingly popular and easy-to-access surveillance tool for police, GPS data is not currently protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the standards for gaining access to the information are murky and highly variable. That's partly because one of the statutes that bears on the issue was passed in the mid-1980s, before many of the technologies involved were invented. And Congress hasn't done much to update the law since.

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What are Peggy Noonan and Walter Isaacson smoking?—and Fareed Zakaria for that matter. During this 'very serious' debate on CNN's GPS, Peggy Noonan claims that President Obama is 'governing from the left' and that he's 'damaged his brand' by threatening to raise taxes. She also tries to paint the New Jersey governors' race as a twenty point drop in support for the President.

I didn't know he was on the ballot there Peggy. And Walter Isaacson thinks Obama should have had brought in John McCain, Bobby Jindal and Bob Dole to help draft his health care policy. So allowing the Baucus-dogs to run the show in the Finance Committee and the 180 Republican amendments they adopted wasn't quite bad enough for you Walter?

When have any of these Villagers ever suggested that if a Republican President had just brought in the Democratic challenger and allowed them to help craft policy that the public would have been more accepting of it? Did we hear any of this kind of talk after Gore or Kerry lost? I don't think so.

This is not included in the clip above, but here's how Zakaria framed the panel discussion.

ZAKARIA: We have a great show for you today -- a star-studded panel of historians to talk about Obama's first year in office, the political climate in America and around the world.

In the United States it was a good week for the Republican Party that has been on the retreat for almost five years now. It's actually also a sign of a fascinating global pattern, which might not turn out to be bad news for Democrats.

Imagine that you have been told five years ago that a financial crisis, prominently featuring irresponsible banks, would plunge the global economy to its worst level since the 1930s. If you were then asked to predict the results of elections held after this crisis of capitalism, you might have said that the right, the party of free enterprise and of bankers, would do badly, and the left, the party of government, would do well. And you would have been dead wrong.

Last week in the United States, the Republicans did better than anyone expected. Last month in Germany, the center right won a resounding victory. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy's right-wing government reigns with considerable public support. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi has managed to stay in power, largely because the electorate is dissatisfied by the left. In Britain, the conservatives are poised to win their first national election in 17 years.

Why?

Look at the kinds of right-wing parties that are winning. David Cameron of Great Britain calls himself a progressive conservative. Sarkozy of France assails bankers, and calls for much stricter financial regulation. Merkel of West Germany rejects arguments for free market reform and defends Germany's social market economy.

Even in America, the Republicans who did well did so by stressing mainstream positions on restricting government spending. The right has moved to the center, which remains the high ground of politics these days. If Democrats want to stay vibrant, all they have to do is just remember that.

[...]

All day long on cable news talk shows we hear about how President Obama is doing. On Fox, some say he's a socialist who's trying to indoctrinate our children, even as he mortgages their future. On MSNBC he is the lonely hero, fighting to give help to the sick, employ the jobless and end racism in our time. And here on CNN, well, I won't say an answer today.

I wanted to see if we could get some of a clear-eyed look at what kind of a president he really is, and what kind of a world he faces. So I've gathered a panel of talented historians and writers -- people who know greatness and the lack thereof when they see it, to help me accomplish this mission.

They all somehow forgot to talk about the Congressional races that the Democrats won, and Fareed Zakaria actually implied with a straight face that the Republican Party is moving to the center and the Democratic Party has not already. Who does he think he's kidding? So no, this is not Fox News Fareed, but it may as be when you’re reciting from the same talking points that they are. Transcript from CNN below the fold.

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Fareed Zakaria talks to former Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh who recently resigned as a Political Officer in Afghanistan. You can watch the entire interview here.

ZAKARIA: Matthew Hoh is the young Foreign Service officer who resigned this week from his post in Afghanistan. He joins me now.

Matthew, I'm going to just start by reading a bit from your resignation letter. You say, "I fail to see the worth or value in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is truly a 35-year-old civil war."

And then you go on to say, "Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured that their dead have been sacrificed for a purpose worthy of such futures lost, love vanished and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can any more be made. As such, I submit my resignation."

These are very strong words.

Give us some sense of what this insurgency that we are fighting looks like. What did you think people were fighting U.S. troops for?

MATTHEW HOH, FORMER MARINE CAPTAIN AND U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: The first place where I really had -- where this was codified for me and where I started to understand what we were doing and how we were involved -- the Korengal Valley, which I'm sure a lot of your viewers are familiar with. It's been on the cover of TIME Magazine. The "New York Times" refers to it as the valley of death. Off the top of my head, unfortunately, I can't remember how many American soldiers we have lost there, but it's probably 30 or 40.

This is a valley, I don't know, 15, 20 kilometers long. There's only 10,000 people in it. They speak their own language. They speak Korengali. In the year 2009 we have a valley with people who speak their own language. Their only trade is the timber trade. And when they move their timber, they don't even leave their valley. Most of the time, I believe, they just take it to the Mazar Valley, and a middleman picks it up and brings it to Pakistan for them.

We show up. We enter their valley. We occupy the richest man's timber mill. And then we bring in Afghan army and Afghan police, who aren't from there.

And then what do we do? Then we have the Afghan police and Afghan army. They say to the Korengalis, they say, "These mountains here that your families have been cutting trees down, sustaining yourselves for hundreds of years, you don't own them. The central government does. And you have to pay tax on that."

I'm not sure how many people anywhere else in the world wouldn't take up arms against something like that.

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Fareed Zakaria talked to author of Liars Poker, Michael Lewis, about what the future is for Wall Street and the economy, and Lewis is not optomistic due to the revolving door between our government and the financial sector.

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Michael Lewis.

Michael, there are sort of two views on the future of Wall Street. One is, this whole game is over. And sort of, to a certain extent, you've been expressing it a little bit, that, you know, this is a 30-year boom. We're going to look back it the way we did the 1920s, maybe the 1890s.

But there's another view that says there are so many smart people out there, and they are so hungry, and they desperately want to find ways to make money, that you're going to actually see new and interesting ways that these firms will either produce money, or there'll be a whole series of smaller firms -- you know, risk-taking firms like hedge funds on the one side, much more staid banks on the other.

What do you think? What does your gut tell you the future of Wall Street is going to look like?

LEWIS: I think that we are in for another day of reckoning down the road. I just don't know when it is.

I think that they haven't even properly evaluated the institutions. They haven't been honest about what these institutions have on their books. They've had phony stress tests.

So, we're in a kind of, I think, right now, in a period where there's a false sense that it's over, that the crisis is passed. I don't think the crisis is passed.

Now, they haven't all deleveraged. Morgan Stanley did, to its chagrin. But everybody else is still running these huge -- a huge amount of leverage. But that's going to change. I think the general sense that this sort of risk-taking should not take place in a public corporation, especially one that's too big to fail, will express itself in regulation that will prevent it from happening.

But you're right. There are all these smart people. And they're used to making huge sums of money. And it's kind of hard to believe that that will just end.

I don't think it will just end. I think it will find a different expression. I think that what you'll see is hedge funds will become more and more interesting.

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I was pretty upset when I caught this on the news yesterday, since my GPS is my guide through the wilds of New Jersey whenever I have to cross the Delaware River. We've gotten so used to these little buggers so fast, it's hard to imagine how we'd do without them now:

The global positioning system could fail next year and repairs aren't moving quickly enough to prevent failure, according a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

It's unclear whether the U.S. Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to prevent disruption in GPS service for military and civilian users, according to the report.

The GAO said that the Air Force has struggled in recent years to stay within cost and scheduling constraints while building GPS satellites. So far, one satellite program has incurred cost overruns of $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been pushed back three years to November 2009.

"Of particular concern is leadership for GPS acquisition, as GAO and other studies have found the lack of a single point of authority for space programs and frequent turnover in program managers have hampered requirements setting, funding stability, and resource allocation," the report states. "If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to."

That could have wide-ranging implications on all GPS users, although the Air Force and others can make contingency plans, the GAO report said.

My friend John Amato has been asking where are the economists debating what's going on in this country on my television. Well, Fareed Zakaria had just that kind of discussion on his show GPS. This is a debate worth listening to with some actual economists on where we're at right now. The one thing that struck me with watching this clip is just how severe the problem of poverty is that is not being addressed by the media in the US and being ignored as part of our national dialog.

Full transcript to follow:

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