Do you like rock music and guitars and America and sometimes Liverpool?

This is definitely worth 6 minutes and 21 seconds in your day.

Prince, Tom Petty, a tribute to George Harrison, and the greatest guitar solo ever.

What fresh hell is this? The administrative subpoena.

Wired's Threat Level blog this week had a great article on the rise in the federal government's use of the administrative subpoena in prosecuting the wars on drugs and terror, two initiatives that have arguably expanded well beyond their initial mandate.

House rules.

An administrative subpoena is kind of like a search warrant-lite. It is an official demand that the recipient produce information, records, data, etc. It does not require a judge's review or approval or a showing of probable cause, and it is not executed by law enforcement. A subpoena is free from the meatier restrictions of the Fourth Amendment, but it is subject to that amorphous legal standard of "reasonableness," which, despite precedent guidelines like "narrowly tailored" and "relevant," means little more than what the judge reviewing the challenge wants it to mean that day.

I won't rehash the Wired article because I think David Kravets did a fine job of reporting and contextualizing the facts, which are sufficiently disturbing with their depiction of government's Stretch Armstrong-like creeping reach. But I cannot emphasize enough how corrosive these practices have become to our Fourth Amendment rights and to the bulwarks of checks and balances.

There seems to be a domino effect of administrative subpoenas that allow the executive branch to go on fishing expeditions, which have historically been detested by courts for their intrusiveness into private lives, even at the risk of not prosecuting a guilty person. But that's the beauty of our system: a man is innocent until proven guilty. And it's a hard thing to prove. It should be a hard thing to prove; not because we want criminals to get away, but because we don't want innocent people socially rebuked or incarcerated.

Instead, we're seeing an odd willingness from courts to abdicate sole responsibility of defending the Constitution to Congress and the executive. I'm not advocating a rash of "activist judges," and I realize that under today's very hostile political climate that it is a fine line for the judiciary to walk, but I do expect the courts to have the fortitude to call a spade a spade.

However, the legislature takes the attitude that its job ends after the laws have been signed on this matter. And now that both courts and Congress have washed their hands of the matter, requiring only the illusion of accountability, the executive administrative and law enforcement agencies are left with carte blanche power. I'm not so cynical as to believe that every bureaucrat or police officer sets out with mustache-twirling intent. But it's not just a platitude that absolute power breeds absolute corruption.

From the perspective of a law-abiding citizen who enjoys her civil rights, this is going to get much worse. Have you ever tried to put a cat back into a bag?

Best Halloween costume. EVER!

So, a velociraptor has been walking around Melbourne.

OK, not really, but this is such an incredible example of modern puppeteering. I really want to know if they're going to mass produce this suit. Wouldn't that be the greatest couples costume?

FOUND: Tatooine

Astronomers monitoring the Kepler telescope stumbled upon a multi-planet binary solar system that would yield a sunset much like the one George Lucas dreamed of for Tatooine.

Wookies and space geeks high-five!

I want to go there.

Context...doesn't matter

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.

Here's why the context of the "you didn't build that" comment doesn't help Pres. Obama.
If the "that" he was referring to was the business you've got -- a grammatically sound interpretation of the remark -- it shows, at best, economic ignorance and, at worst, hostility towards free market capitalism.

But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and concede that it was just a grammatical error; let's accept that he was referring to roads, infrastructure, the American system, etc. Under that interpretation, it shows that Pres. Obama believes that we the people don't own an investment in our own government. We didn't lay the asphalt, fire the steel, or teach the leaders of tomorrow (even though some of us actually DID do that), so we didn't build it. Government put it all in motion (except for those handful that actually DID those things); we just paid for it. 

When was the last time Pres. Obama, or any member of Congress, pulled out a wallet and said, "This school construction project? Yeah, that's on me," and then picked up a hardhat and went to work? The government doesn't do these things unless they can stick us with the bill. So, while maybe we didn't physically build it (except, again, for those people who had a direct hand in it), our financial contribution to it is reduced to nothing, and government gets all the credit.

Let's finally put all this equivocating aside. People have a right to be incensed with the president for saying, "you didn't build that," because no matter how you slice it, it's damned insulting.