Politics Break

My boss, like me, loves to take pictures. Unlike me, he has a very expensive camera with lots of bells and whistles and lenses, and he actually knows how to use it. Here's one of his photos taken here on Galveston island. (Click on it to get a better view.)

There really is a lot of wonderful birdlife here. I’m enchanted by them all, but the pelicans may be my favorite. I suppose that could be simply because they’re big enough and move slowly enough to follow. They’re so much fun to watch making arrows of themselves and shooting into the water for food, but I especially like to watch them glide along the surface of the water just inches above. It amazes me how long they can glide through the air without flapping their wings. But then there’s those little guys that scurry along the shoreline dashing in and out with the tide – sandpipers? They actually make me laugh out loud. And those snowy white egrets with the brilliant yellow galoshes. I think I like the gulls for some of the very reasons so many people hate them. And there’s some large black birds that hang out in the trees and make four or five very different sounding calls – I used to think it was several different species instead of the same bird. I shouldn’t start naming favorites, because I’ll just think of another species that I like just as well.

More Secret Memos to Come?

---The memo was highly controversial within DOJ. [WH Office of Legal Council’s Jack] Goldsmith disavowed it a mere nine months after its release. He later wrote in his book The Terror Presidency that he was stunned by the "one-sided legal arguments" and "unusual lack of care and sobriety" in both of the torture memos, which he said seemed "more an exercise of sheer power than reasoned analysis."

---The memo alludes to other secret memos. You will certainly hear protest from Senate Democrats that those memos have not been released--including in the hearing this week with AG Mukasey.

---And you will hear outrage from civil liberties groups about a toothless and complacent Congress that for years has known about these secret memos--and done little to get them from the WH.

  ABC

Yes, civil liberties groups, however, are looked upon as terrorist allies in this country after "9/11 changed everything."

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Torture Memo Fallout

It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique the Pentagon deemed useful. Criminal statutes prohibiting torture stopped at the water's edge, because, Yoo wrote, "such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of Commander in Chief power solely to the President."

As Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, tells the Post, "it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war."

[...]

Despite the fact that Congress has been asking for the declassification of this memo, it appears to have only been released now as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

  TPM

The ACLU! The traitors!

The memo was rescinded just nine months later by Jack Goldsmith, when he came in to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Yoo himself doesn't see what all the hubbub is about.

In fact, he says the later Justice Department officials were weenies, too cowardly to uphold the “tradition” of letting the President have his way in wartime.

John Yoo is in fact a law professor in good standing at that liberal oasis Berkeley.

And when will the war criminals be tried, eh?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Integritude

Within less than a week the Basra offensive has gone from "a defining moment" in Iraqi's history, in the President's words, to an operation conceived by Maliki that the U.S. didn't plan, had little warning of, and couldn't control.

  TPM

We're a nation led by worms.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Torture Memo Released

It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.

  WaPo

I would have thought that the laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment were in place specifically to address wartime.

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," [memo author John] Yoo wrote.

[...]

"Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

Looking at those pictures from Abu Ghraib, I have to wonder what that sentiment is those guards are expressing if not malice or sadism. Jolly entertainment?

Self-defense.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

There Goes Pakistan

[A] visit by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte turned out to be series of indignities and chilly, almost hostile, receptions as he bore the brunt of the full range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule by Washington’s favored ally, President Pervez Musharraf.

Faced with a new democratic lineup that is demanding talks, not force, in the fight against terrorism, Mr. Negroponte publicly swallowed a bitter pill at his final news conference on Thursday, acknowledging that there would now be some real differences in strategy between the United States and Pakistan.

  NYT

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

All in the Family

Okay, this is a year old, but I just came across it.

Are we sure this is a nephew? It's not just that he looks like George.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Summer 2008: End of the World?

[A] giant particle accelerator […] will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer [that some think] might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

[...]

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

  NYTimes

Or, as we know it here at YWA, Dick Cheney’s heart.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment.

That really doesn’t seem so unreasonable a request to me. After all, nobody bothered to try to determine how to dispose of nuclear waste when they went forth to create nuclear reactors, and look at the problems that’s created, which sadly, nobody ever talks about. We’ll just store those “spent” rods until science comes up with the answer. We’re pretty good at rushing in to something without a good plan to get out. And so far, that approach has proved to be problematic.

CERN is a European entity, and so probably isn’t beholden to any lawsuit in Hawaii, but also named in the suit are the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.

[A] restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

[...]

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

  

If they’re still around to sift, that is.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Fire it up, boys. This I want to see.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Ewwwwwwwww

Seen at Bad Attitudes.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Booooo - Part 2

Chris Dodd thinks Bush had another wild pitch:

Top Democrats Monday dismissed the Bush administration's plan to overhaul the nation's financial regulatory system as inadequate, with one leading senator calling the proposals a "wild pitch."

Sen. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said he "welcomed the idea" of updating the way bodies such as the Federal Reserve Board oversee the U.S. economy.

But the Connecticut Democrat and former presidential candidate said the plan laid out by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "doesn't relate to the issues they are trying to confront."

[...]

"This is opening day in baseball, so let me use a baseball analogy: I would call this the wild pitch," Dodd said. "It's not even close to the strike zone."

[...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, was somewhat more conciliatory, calling the plan "a step in the right direction."

  CNN

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Booooooo

Bush was seriously booed - you can easily hear it the whole time he's out there - while tossing out the first pitch to the Nationals. The announcer, however, does a good job of pretending it isn't happening, praising Bush as the only president who doesn't stand several paces in front of the mound, and even working in 9/11. I wonder if the WH speechmakers wrote the script. I also wonder if the folks doing the booing experienced any SS harassment. And I also wonder how tall the batter would have had to be to swing at that pitch.

It also sounds like the introduction says that Bush is "here to throw out the inaugural bitch," but I'm sure that's just a sound distortion - unlike the boos.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Al-Sadr Speaks

Saturday:

Anti-American Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers Saturday to defy government orders to surrender their weapons, as U.S. jets struck Shiite extremists near Basra to bolster a faltering Iraqi offensive against gunmen in the city.

  Courier News

Sunday:

Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr offered to pull his fighters off the streets of Basra and other cities if the government ceases raids against his followers and frees prisoners held without charge, the Associated Press reported, citing a statement from al-Sadr's Najaf headquarters.

  Bloomberg

We now await the Iraqi government’s official response. Reuters is reporting that an aide to al-Sadr says the Iraqi government has agreed to all the demands.