... John Yoo must have been busy polishing [Cheney's] knob that day ...
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Dear Boalt Hall:
When are you going to revoke John Yoo's tenure? Aren't you ashamed to have him on your faculty? Surely there are some deserving wine law professors out there to whom you can award his coveted slot? Maybe they could discuss the finer points of the limits of presidential power over pinot grigio on your sunny deck? Finally, why isn't today's NYT story isn't on your Faculty in the News page?
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Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.
Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.
“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.
The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.
Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.
Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
“Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” said one former senior administration official. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.”
"It's not that I hate the police, exactly. It's that all the big bellied bastards that I do hate love the police." - Brendan Behan
But whatever the real story is regarding the showing of identification information by Gates and the officer, police misconduct in this incident went further. Gates reportedly got understandably angry and frustrated at the officer for refusing to provide him with this identifying information and/or for refusing to accept his own identification documents, and at that point, the officer abused his power by arresting Gates and charging him with disorderly conduct.
There's nothing unusual about this, sadly. It is common practice for police in America to abuse their authority and to arrest people on a charge of "disorderly conduct" when those people simply exercise their free speech rights and object strenuously to how they are being treated by an officer. Try it out sometime. If you are given a ticket for going five miles an hour over the posted speed limit, tell the traffic officer he or she is a stupid moron, and see if you are left alone. My bet is that you will find yourself either ticketed on another more serious charge, or even arrested for "disorderly conduct." If you happen to be black or some other race than white, I'll even put money on that bet. (If you're stupid enough to go out and test this hypothesis, please don't expect me to post your bail!)
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Jon Stewart - 44%
Brian Williams - 29%
Charles Gibson - 19%
Katie Couric - 7%
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Harry Reid is a joke. A laughable, sick joke that is allowing Americans to have a substandard way of life.
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Half the Republicans' opposition to a public health care option comes not from policy differences with the Democrats, or fundamental philosophical differences about the role of government, but purely from a desire to score political points against President Barack Obama, a senior Republican senator has admitted.
George Voinovich (R-OH) said on CNBC Wednesday that a desire to prevent the Democratic president from scoring a historical victory with a public health plan accounts for at least 50 percent of the GOP opposition to the plan.
I was a child in the sixties
When dreams could be held through TV
We had Disney, and Cronkite, and Martin Luther
And, I believed, I believed . . . I BELIEVED
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It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go
Words & Music by Nanci Griffith
Recorded at Celtic Connections 2009 - Glasgow, Scotlland
What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label, “Liberal”? If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But, if by a “Liberal,” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties - someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I'm proud to say that I'm a “Liberal.”
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - An alleged extortion attempt has exposed a possible sexual relationship between a prominent state senator and a young legislative intern.
That senator is Republican Paul Stanley from Memphis, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
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I really do care about the healthcare reform bill that is floating around in Congress, and here comes the but, but I am so very tired of hearing Republicans and especially blue dog Democrats telling us how harmful and dangerous it’s going to be. Ninety nine percent of what they are saying is lie after lie and we know they know it. To take something this important and put political motives ahead of common sense is disgraceful.
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Mary McCaslin and Dave Stamey
Stacked Stone Winery July 19, 2009
Paso Robles, CA
(The closest modern equivalent? Burning Man, with similar sequential signs along the entrance road as you drive in -- though of course BM's signs tend to be far less about male grooming and far more about, you know, god and drugs and sex and love and enlightenment and sex and Rumi and Shiva, and no one ever really shaves at Burning Man, unless you're visiting Genital Grooming Camp. But never mind that now).
Oh were they upset, absolutely incensed that the company dared to disparage their fine totem animal and demanding the company take down the signs immediately, and the slogan writers should be ashamed of themselves and banned and then also shot and beaten with the butts of Beretta handguns and kicked in the face because they are what's wrong with this country and they will surely burn in Sodom-sucking hell forevermore you commie homo lefty pervert pinko jackass fa--ot.
In a way, it was heartening and fascinating to be reminded that hate mail is not exactly new, to ponder just how far back it goes (Cro-Magnon caves, I imagine, to the first disparaging grunt in response to a nice wall sketch of a bison), how deep into the archives of media history you can dig and find some sample of someone somewhere writing a letter to someone else telling them they loathe and disrespect everything they say and represent on this planet, and if said person ceased to exist or was somehow run over by a large tractor-like apparatus, the semi-articulate letter writer in question would positively cream in his Wranglers and shoot a shotgun into a pod of dolphins with joy, and call it America.
Warming Climate Threatens California Fruit and Nut Production
We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.
We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected never to give up one war without taking on another.
And why stop there? To Ignatieff, the example of Kosovo was central and persuasive. The people who could not see the point were "those left wingers" and "isolationists." By contrast, the strategists and soldiers willing to bear the "burden" of empire were not only the party of the far-seeing and the humane, they were also the realists, those who knew that nothing good can come without a cost -- and that nothing so marks a people for greatness as a succession of triumphs in a series of just wars.
The future wars of choice for the Defense Department appear to be wars of heavy bombing and light-to-medium occupation. The weapons will be drones in the sky and the soldiers will be, as far as possible, special forces operatives charged with executing "black ops" from village to village and tribe to tribe. It seems improbable that such wars -- which will require free passage over sovereign states for the Army, Marines, and Air Force, and the suppression of native resistance to occupation -- can long be pursued without de facto reliance on regime change. Only a puppet government can be thoroughly trusted to act against its own people in support of a foreign power.
Such are the wars designed and fought today in the name of American safety and security. They embody a policy altogether opposed to an idealism of liberty that persisted from the founding of the U.S. far into the twentieth century. It is easy to dismiss the contrast that Washington, Paine, and others drew between the morals of a republic and the appetites of an empire. Yet the point of that contrast was simple, literal, and in no way elusive. It captured a permanent truth about citizenship in a democracy. You cannot, it said, continue a free people while accepting the fruits of conquest and domination. The passive beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.
A chance encounter inspires my first bill: Legislation making the service dog program more affordable for our troops.
After I met Luis, I did some research. Service dogs like Tuesday can be of immense benefit to vets suffering from physical and emotional wounds. Yes, they provide companionship. But they can also detect changes in a person's breathing, perspiration or scent to anticipate and ward off an impending panic attack with some well-timed nuzzling. They are trained to let their masters know when it's time to take their medication and to wake them from terrifying nightmares.
Service dogs raise their masters' sense of well-being. There is evidence to suggest that increasing their numbers would reduce the alarming suicide rate among veterans, decrease the number of hospitalizations, and lower the cost of medications and human care.
Veterans report that service dogs help break their isolation. People will often avert their eyes when they see a wounded veteran. But when the veteran has a dog, the same people will come up and say hi to pet the dog and then strike up a conversation.
We can finally stop talking about the first lady's penchant for showing off her toned arms and the national conversation can turn to something substantive: her husband's unflattering, baggy blue jeans.
Fashion bloggers are throwing spitballs at the high-waisted "mom jeans" President Barack Obama wore when he threw out the first pitch at baseball's All-Star Game this week.
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Reporting from Beijing -- In a popular Chinese legend, a giant named Kua Fu chased the fiery sun across the sky, hoping to bring about the end of a catastrophic drought. Though the hero dies in impassioned pursuit, the gods take notice of his inspired effort and punish the sun, forcing it farther from the Earth and drawing the calamitous weather to a close.
Now, Chinese media are ablaze with the mythical giant's name -- this time, to refer to amateur astronomers who have flocked to southern China for the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century. International and domestic tourists have descended on government-designated viewing spots such as Shanghai, Suzhou and Wuhan to witness the natural phenomenon.
WASHINGTON -- The Senate voted today to halt production of the Air Force's missile-eluding F-22 Raptor fighter jets in a high-stakes, veto-laden showdown over President Barack Obama's efforts to shift defense spending to a next generation of smaller, single-engine F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
The defense bill has funds to build 30 F-35s. The plane is currently being produced in small numbers for testing purposes. The single-engine plane will eventually replace the venerable F-16 and the Air force's aging fleet of A-10s. Its primary purposed is to attack targets on the ground.
Did you get that? If you don't trust the government, go out and buy a gun. Because why? Because you can use the muzzle to push the buttons in a voting booth? Or because you can use it to shoot and kill any government motherfuckers who are going to...well, do what?
So what is driving the good right wing to talk more and more openly about arming themselves for some coming uprising? Has Barack Obama sent the FBI to break down law-abiding conservatives' doors, take their guns, shoot their women, and rape their dogs? Did Joe Biden start an enemies list and had a handcuffed Sean Hannity dragged to a prison where he can be beaten until he gives the whereabouts of Steve Doocy? Holy shit, an ignorant outside observer might think, what is so deadly that a media figure like Beck is, in essence, telling people to buy guns now?
And the answer is a slight raise in the marginal tax rate on the wealthy? An attempt to provide health care to uninsured Americans? A legally-elected government in a representative democracy spending money in the way those campaigning said it would be spent? If Ben Franklin were around, he'd scoff, "Pussies," beat Glenn Beck unconscious with his cane, let Thomas Paine sodomize him, and head back to Paris for more time with whores.
If Obama and the Democrats get health care reform done, the Republican Party is finished in the next election. So it's pulling out the stops.
Obama quakes at the notion of a Congressional recess, because he knows his party's truly identifying mascot has devolved from the stubbornly determined donkey to the rabbit -- a scared, neurotic, running rabbit. He knows the power of negativity is tenfold that of the positive; some of these lawmaking boys and girls might hit the panic button after experiencing a month of intense, specially interested, home-district pressure groups opposed principally to a public option.
And that is why, in turn, these negative voices are salivating at the thought of delay in the poisonous form of a summer recess; it could well be a cooling period that ultimately ices the odds of authentic reform.
Meanwhile, however, and on the definite upside, these voices aren't doing themselves any big favors in their unthinkingly splashy and over-the-top negativity: and as long as Congress sits (and sits, and sits) in session, Obama can more effectively exploit many of the more egregious examples.
Yesterday, for instance, it was heartening to hear his aggressive pushback to Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's ruthlessly feckless comment -- "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo; it will break him" -- but just as stunning, to me, was the sympathetic cable-news commentary that poured from Obama's rebuttal, which itself noted the wholly politics-centric nakedness of DeMint's comment. Why was I stunned at the high broadcast volume of negativity against DeMint's negativity? Because, simply, I thought that if anything in this world was axiomatic to the now tedious point of non-noteworthiness, it was that contemporary Republicans are always more interested in political success than people's welfare (my em).
The anti-gay circus has arrived in Maine. But, the latest all-male anti-gay group is not content with just fighting same-sex marriage. No, they're also opposed to any marriage performed at City Hall -- without God.
If you want to boil down the position of Republicans on healthcare reform, this from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in response to a question about the uninsured, says it all: "Well, they don't go without health care, because they can just go to the emergency room."
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Listening to the recording now, it's kind of embarrassing to hear how very wrong Reagan's attacks on Medicare were at the time. In 1961, Reagan was a GE spokesperson, known for his conservative politics. When he lashed out at the idea of Medicare, it wasn't surprising, but it was the message itself that was so bizarre.
According to Reagan, Medicare would lead federal officials to dictate where physicians could practice medicine, and open the door to government control over where Americans were allowed to live. In fact, Reagan warned that if Medicare became law, there was a real possibility that the federal government would control where Americans go and what they do for a living.
In a line that may sound familiar to Sarah Palin fans, Reagan added, "[I]f you don't [stop Medicare] and I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."
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King: So Donna, what is happening? You know, we had an election in November. What we thought we got was united government, a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. Instead it seems that we just have a different kind of divided government. You have a Democratic President that's fighting with wings of his own party in congress, including, this is from Democracy for America. It's an email. It's a liberal organization. It is now sending an email to its supporters essentially saying send us money so that we can "run tough ads pressuring Democratic Senators who've taken millions of dollars from the health and insurance interests while standing in the way of one of President Obama's top priorities".
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King: I mean, they all raise money, but they're essentially saying they're being bought to block President Obama. [vid at the link]
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When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them -- as though they do what he did -- even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: "the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."
In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House's claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam). During that conflict, he stood up to a General in a Press Conference in Saigon who was attempting to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at face value ... [em in orig]
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All of that was ignored when [Halberstam] died, with establishment media figures exploiting his death to suggest that his greatness reflected well on what they do, as though what he did was the same thing as what they do (much the same way that Martin Luther King's vehement criticisms of the United States generally and its imperialism and aggression specifically have been entirely whitewashed from his hagiography).
So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite. Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment -- Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" -- was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.
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Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.
In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.
The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs. [my em]
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He went to war as a teenager, helped keep flimsy aircraft flying, survived his wounds and came home from World War I to a long – very long – and fruitful life.
But only in his last years did he discover his true mission: to remind new generations of the sacrifices of the millions slaughtered in the trenches, killed in the air, or lost at sea in what Britons call the Great War.
Allingham, who was the world's oldest man when he died Saturday at 113, attributed his remarkable longevity to "cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women. (my em)"
He was the last surviving original member of the Royal Air Force, which was formed in 1918. He made it a personal crusade to talk about a conflict that wiped out much of a generation. Though nearly blind, he would take the outstretched hands of visitors in both of his, gaze into the eyes of children, veterans and journalists and deliver a message he wanted them all to remember about those left on the battlefield.
"I don't want to see them forgotten," he would say quietly. "We were pals."
As a mechanic, Allingham's job was to maintain the rickety craft. He also flew as an observer on a biplane. At first, his weaponry consisted of a standard issue Lee Enfield .303 rifle – sometimes two. Parachutes weren't issued.
That's about the time he met Goodwin, a nursing home inspector who realized that veterans of Allingham's generation were not getting the care they needed to address the trauma they had experienced at the Somme, Gallipoli and Ypres and the other blood-drenched World War I battlefields. [...]
SAN FRANCISCO — A drug deal plays out, California-style:
A conservatively dressed courier drives a company-leased Smart Car to an apartment on a weekday afternoon. Erick Alvaro hands over a white paper bag to his 58-year-old customer, who inspects the bag to ensure that everything he ordered over the phone is there.
An eighth-ounce of organic marijuana buds for treating his seasonal allergies? Check. An eighth of a different strain for insomnia? Check. THC-infused lozenges and tea bags? Check and check, with a free herb-laced cookie thrown in as a thank-you gift.
It's a $102 credit-card transaction carried out with the practiced efficiency of a home-delivered pizza — and with just about as much legal scrutiny.
More and more, having premium pot delivered to your door in California is not a crime. It is a legitimate business.
Although a dozen other states, including Washington, have adopted similar laws, California is the only one where privately owned pot shops have flourished. Los Angeles County alone has at least 400 dispensaries and delivery services, nearly twice as many outlets as Amsterdam, the Netherlands capital whose coffee shops have been synonymous with free-market marijuana for decades.
California's pot dispensaries now have more in common with a corner grocery than a speak-easy. They advertise freely, offering discount coupons and daily specials.
Meredith Lintott, Mendocino County's district attorney, argues that big-time growers never would bother filing tax returns. "Legalizing it isn't going to touch the big money," she said.
But others predict the black-market business model would fall apart.
Large-scale agri-businesses in California's Central Valley would dominate legal marijuana production as they already do bulk wine grapes, advocates argue. Pot prices would fall dramatically, forcing growers to abandon costly clandestine operations that authorities say trash the land and steal scarce water.
And legalization, supporters insist, would save state and local governments billions on police, court and prison costs.
But others survey California in 2009 and say the cannabis future is now. Richard Lee has parlayed two Oakland dispensaries into a mini-empire that includes a marijuana-lifestyle magazine, a starter-plant nursery and a three-campus marijuana trade school. Oaksterdam University's main campus is a prominent fixture in revitalized downtown Oakland.
All without legalization.
California Public Debt Rated on Par With Kazakhstan, Iceland
Causes panic in Kazakhstan, Iceland.
Biggest Decline in Video Game Sales Since 2000
Industry fears kids may be going back outside to play.
Many States Closing Rest Areas
Replacing them with speed traps.
Amazon Deletes 1984, Animal Farm From All Kindles
Warns Kindle owners: Jeff Bezos Is Watching You.
AS political theater, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings tanked faster than the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign. [...]
Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.
The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned. The Sotomayor questioners also assumed a Hispanic woman, simply for being a Hispanic woman, could be portrayed as The Other and patronized like a greenhorn unfamiliar with How We Do Things Around Here. The senators seemed to have no idea they were describing themselves when they tried to caricature Sotomayor as an overemotional, biased ideologue.
[...] Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.
Today on C-Span’s Washington Journal, a caller told a story of how he was forced to see numerous doctors at different hospitals in the area in where he lives, some as far as 100 miles away, to get a diagnosis. The caller then faulted health insurance companies for preventing the practice of having “diagnostic tests done under one roof.” “So in essence,” the caller noted, “the insurance companies are the ones controlling what tests you can get, when you get them, how you get them and if they’re accepted or not.”
In a remarkable moment of candor, C-Span’s guest — Republican Congressman Tim Murphy (PA) — agreed:
MURPHY: Yeah and that brings up the point here that with regard to one of our big frustrations with insurance companies is they control the market place, they control what’s done, a lot of times doctors not making the decisions here. And you recognize the frustration.
Watch it:
Above the Clouds says:
Rep. Murphy--there is a Mr. Limbaugh on the phone for you.
The music on this piece is from 3 movements of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" ten-piano suite.
They are:
"Promenade" [from start to 1:38]
"Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)" [from 1:38 to 3:45]
"The Great Gate of Kiev" [from 3:45 to end]
Do you notice the picture on the bass drums? It is a drawing of the Great Gate of Kiev complete with a bell tower to its right.
