This is part of a coordinated national campaign by the ACLU, and our Iowa ACLU affiliate Iowa has been asked to be one of leading state organizations.

Clients:   We are looking for customers of AT&T or customers of MCI for long distance land lines (not cellular service) before it was purchased by Verizon.

Attorneys:  This would involve preparation of a very simple 1 page complaint to the utilities board, describing what has been made public about the NSA spying program in regard to records of domestic telephone calls which major phone companies turned over without a warrant or court order requiring them to do so.  The second paragraph of the document would complain about invasion of privacy rights and possibly unfair trade practices by the phone companies.  I have background materials and suggested formats.

Please respond if you can help.  We will file Monday or (Tue at the latest) but I will be gone and you will be working directly with the National ACLU legal advisers.

MOST OF ALL WE NEED CLIENTS!

Stone, Ben

http://www.iowaclu.org/

Now, on to the Blog Roundup.

Comings and Goings

We welcome another chapter of “Drinking Liberally” to Iowa. The former president of “Students for Art Small,” Nick Bergin, started his chapter last Wednesday at the Mill in Iowa City at 7:00 PM. It joins chapters already in existence in Ames and Des Moines. 

We mourn another blogger-turned-former-blogger. Drew Miller, a long-time Iowa blogger, is quiting the business so he can work for the IDP. They are lucky to have him, and probably don't deserve him. 

Math and Other Statistical Anomolies

Obviously, we all knew that Steve King was prone to exaggeration, but this takes the cake. An email to one of my fellow bloggers, State 29, does the hard math King can't seem to figure out. Memo to King: sometimes crime is actually committed by white people!

Speaking of Math, Woodbury Democrat got this from another site, but it does explain the shrub tax cut. I guess my wife and I will save about $50 a year. I can use my savings to buy more yard signs for local candidates, but my $50 sure isn't the nearly $5,000 the rich will get to pour into their candidates!

Thanks to your help, we can fight the Repubs with a local champion! Boxer's PAC for a Change. Our own Leonard Boswell came out on top with 31% of the vote. He's no progressive, and probably doesn't need anymore cash, but attention to Iowa is good. This means that Pelosi will send out emails asking for money for Boswell, and the more he spends, the more the Repubs spend on his challenger, and the less they spend on other state races and nasty radio ads run 36 hours before the election designed to smear Democrats. At least, that's the way it is supposed to work. Oh yeah. Maybe Leonard can use the money to improve his web site. Something more genuine than his “My Space,” page would be a good start.

Speaking of new web sites, someone is getting angry at Chetnotstupid. There's some smokin' debate going on there, and I still can't figure out what the motivation for the creator of the site is. If you know, please email me here and fill me in. The comments are pretty much in support of Ed, so I guess it's a good site, but I am not so sure yet.

The anonymity of Chetnotstupid makes things a lot more complicated. Political Forecast is all over a case in Burlington involving bloggers and partisan politics. This is an area of immense political possibilities, and there is a lot of fighting that has yet to be done before there will be a decision about how blogs are paid for and what they can say. The scary thing is that, as Polticial Forecast points out, regulations at the state level could wind up being more restrictive than protections allowed us under the first amendment.

Finally: the Iowans for Sensible Priorities Rally at the capital was a success. Here are some pictures for you to check out.

Let me know if you can identify any of these folks, and I'll credit them as participants!

Meanwhile, stay tuned to Blog for Iowa for another blog update next Saturday. Same blog time, same blog channel.