Rain Storm -- an online journal of opinion and culture

According to an AT&T whistleblower, the telephone giant made available to a government snoop every single phone call you made, every single email you wrote, every single online video or text chat you ever had, a list of every Web site or chat room you ever visited, copies of every photo you've ever downloaded or emailed or received, so government spies could go through it and do whatever it is they do when they peep into your private life.

This has the smell of a massive online advocacy campaign against AT&T. We should destroy that company until it comes out and says, unequivocally, that the charges against it are 100% false. And if they pull any more George Bush legal mumbo jumbo ("we just couldn't comment on an ongoing investigation"), then we destroy them.

There's only one reason in my book that you don't deny allegations - that's because they're true. No one accused unfairly of being a murderer replies to the charges by saying "I just can't comment on ongoing litigation."

And finally, we need to publicly demand a statement from every phone company and every Internet provider saying that they have NEVER given the government access to ANY of our phone or Internet traffic WITHOUT a court order. And any company that doesn't provide that document can face the public consequences.

_Just 36 percent of the public approves of his job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president's job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.

_Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush's performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That's down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.

_Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush's handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.

"He's in over his head," said Diane Heller, 65, a Pleasant Valley, N.Y., real estate broker and independent voter.

You see, according to the religious right, we just didn't have the rape of women at military academies until - da da da dum - they let the women-folk in as cadets (yeah, I hear there weren't a lot of lynchings in America until black people arrived either).

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Tuesday that he wanted to know who leaked a CIA employee's name to reporters, if in fact someone in his administration wrongly passed out the information.

"Leaks of classified information are bad things. We’ve got too much leaking in Washington,“ Bush said during a stop in Chicago. "I want to know who the leakers are.”

A former top aide to Vice President Cheney told a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity that President Bush authorized him to disclose classified intelligence information about Iraq as a way of rebutting criticism from the agent's husband, according to court papers filed by prosecutors.[Emphasis added]

MIAMI - The deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday for using the Internet to seduce what he thought was a teenage girl, authorities said.

Brian J. Doyle, 55, of Silver Spring, Md., was arrested on charges of use of a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. The charges were issued out of Polk County, Fla.

Doyle had a sexually explicit conversation with what he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he saw on the Internet on March 14, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

The girl was an undercover Polk County Sheriff's Computer Crimes detective, the sheriff's office said.

Doyle sent the girl pornographic movie clips and had sexually explicit conversations via the Internet, the statement said.

During other online conversations, Doyle revealed his name, that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and offered his office and government issued cell phone numbers, the sheriff's office said.