With a curtsey to Dan at Protein Wisdom, this was the Reverend Lowery's inaugural benediction:

We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man and white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

Now, before you get all up in my business, let me give you some Jonah Goldberg:

For instance, you will not soon see a German chancellor of Turkish descent. Nor will a child of North African immigrants soon take the reins of power in France. It will be a long time before a Pakistani or Indian last name appears on the mailbox at 10 Downing St. And yet these countries bubble over with haughty finger-waggers eager to lecture backward and provincial America about race and tolerance. Why not enjoy rubbing Barack Obama in their faces? .... The media understandably, if tediously, focus on how Obama’s presidency is a deathblow to the legacy of official discrimination and racism. True enough. But the fact that a black man can become president of the United States may also be transgressive to all sorts of more relevant racial orthodoxies on the left and in the black community.

But after that, having run past a memorial to the Freedom Riders on Wednesday night, and running past Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on a regular basis, I got your post-racial right here:

The video is long, good, funny, and definitely not for the faint of heart. If I didn't love the guy so much, I might actually have been cheesed at him for equating all southerners with sister-humping banjo players.

Created by LPUK

From the site:

The term liberal is one of the many words in the English language whose meaning has been utterly corrupted. It now means something entirely different to its original historical and philosophical meaning. Funnily enough, this has generally been the fault of those on the right who have wrongly used the word to attack those on the left for being soft or 'progressive'.

In many respects this is a little like calling a cat a dog. To be a liberal basically means you believe in individual freedom. And that you accept the responsibilities that this entails. As is clear, this outlook is worlds apart from the collectivist ideologies of those on the left.

Via the feline enumerator at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

Created by LPUK

The transformation of America into a police state is well underway.

In the wake of the North Hollywood shootout, police forces across the country militarized their forces and now SWAT is called out to evict grandmothers from their foreclosed homes.

Then they began to forcefully object to being photographed.

Now apparently, police forces are now embarking on a full-scale assault on our civil rights, imaging cellphones on the pretense of broken tail-lights.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

This is the kind of equipment (shown opposite) Michigan State Police are using; a portable unit capable of reading the non-volatile flash memory in your phone. It doesn't matter what brand of phone you have, since all cell-phones use the same hardware technologies.

The flash memory image; a digital copy of everything in your phone, can then be read by a PC-based software program that can parse the various logs your cell-phone keeps. That includes all the transceiver cells you've been in, logs of your GPS positioning, calls, some kinds of deletions, your contacts, notes, appointments, etc...

The legal theory on which the police feel they can collect and archive these cell phone memory images is not something I am qualified to comment on, but the current trend towards a "Big Brother" government built on the pretext of "fighting terrorism" suggests we are going to see more of this, not less.

What will major cell phone providers will do in response? Likely nothing since consumers have no meaningful alternative and "cooperation" with the government is so much more profitable than corporate social protest.

Practical counter-measures include encrypting your phone, which is beyond the capabilities of the UFED software, but this only prevents casual browsing of your personal files--not logs. The police will still have a complete record of your calls and movements. Of course, if you are a crime lord or terrorist, the encryption will be a simple obstacle to overcome since the police do have power decryption tools at their disposal.

Ultimately, your best protection is the same advice extended to people who have company email accounts--understand that anything you write is effectively public pronouncement. Don't run your life out of your cell phone.