Molly Died Today - UPDATED

Molly Ivins was 62 years old. She died of breast cancer; this was her third episode that I know about.

Here is the AP obit. Here is the last of Molly's columns that I can find. Her Wikipedia biography is somewhat... derogatory, and has been rightly cited for lack of balance. I will not link it. (UPDATE: The Texas Observer has several columns memorializing Molly... I should have looked there first.)

Losing Molly Ivins less than a half year after losing Ann Richards is just too much. I'll write more about Molly and her influence on me when I can see the screen a little better. Meanwhile, please heed her advice in the last paragraph of her last column:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

R.I.P., Molly Ivins.

UPDATE: Here's a short video clip from "The Big Buy" in which Molly and Jim Hightower speak about Tom DeLay. As grievous an omission as it seems now, I never met Molly or heard her speak in real life. Her primary medium was print, and it was in that medium that I came to appreciate her greatness.

UPDATE: The Texas Observer's web site seems to be overwhelmed tonight, but of course Charles Kuffner has published the Observer's statement and obituary.

Steve
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FBI And Chance The Gardener

Both like to watch:

FBI turns to broad new wiretap method
The FBI's Internet wiretaps after retiring "Carnivore" appear to involve compiling massive databases of information on thousands of users at a time.
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: January 30, 2007, 4:00 AM PST

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

     ...

(Bolds original.)

As a privacy advocate, I have to say this vacuum cleaner sucks. It's a good thing, though, that Paul Ohm is willing to talk about it; clearly he's part of the resistance. Reactions from EFF, EPIC, etc. are about what you would expect: "worse than Carnivore," says one EFF staff attorney, and indeed it looks that way to me, based on what we've been allowed to know. "Grab the full contents of the pipe now; store for later filtering; never throw away anything even if it's irrelevant to the warrant" is certainly different from anything we in the public have seen before. That pr0n site your teenage son viewed last week while you were away from home is now potentially a permanent part of your surfing record... even if you and your household were never the target of an internet wiretap warrant.

I have to resume doing something allegedly useful now. Well, soon. Um, maybe not today. Happy surfing, and remember, Big Bother is watching you... even if only by Chance.

Steve
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Sometimes You Just Have To

... let it all hang out:

WESTERVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- A high school lunch period was disrupted Monday by a greased, naked student who ran around screaming and flailing his arms until police twice used a stun gun on him, authorities said.

Taylor Killian, 18, had rubbed his body with grapeseed oil to keep from being caught, and got up after the first time he was shocked to continue running toward a group of frightened students huddled in a corner at Westerville North High School, Lt. Jeff Gaylor said.

     ...

Police said that an administrator ordered Killian to stop, but that the student made a sexual gesture and kept running.

Killian is in jail and charged with inducing panic, public indecency, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. A message seeking comment was left at Killian's home.

     ...

Whew! The risks of streaking seem to have increased since my student days! Are the Westerville police so incompetent that they can't stop a streaker without a stun gun? I mean, good grief, they knew he wasn't carrying a concealed weapon.

Afterthought: if "inducing panic" is a crime, why isn't the entire Bush administration in the dock?

Blogging will still be sparse today. I really should be doing something else right now, but I just couldn't resist putting this one up.

Steve
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Saturday Signs

So... how long are they? 72 minutes? 90 minutes? 120 minutes? I could go for that! Umm, except for those Friday afternoons when the workday seems to go on forever... maybe I'd better think this over.

Steve
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Good News, Bad News: Molly Is Ill

As good as it is to have Jane Hamsher back among us in the blogosphere ... good news indeed (see previous post)... I just received some bad news in an email on a Democratic list: Molly Ivins is hospitalized in her ongoing battle against breast cancer. A spokesperson said she may be able to go home Monday. I don't have time this evening to write about Molly and her history, or even about the influence she has wrought on my life through her columns (I've never met her). But if you're the praying sort (as she is, and as I am typically not), please say a few for Molly. In any case, keep her in your thoughts. There's no one else like her in this world; most of us would like to see her stay in this world.

Steve
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Jane Is Back!

At Firedoglake. Hurray!

Steve
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John Cornyn Hates The Working Poor

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) couldn't simply vote against the Democratic minimum wage proposal... he went far beyond that. Cornyn voted for an amendment that would eliminate the federal minimum wage altogether.

As Ted Kennedy said,

Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this? Why don't you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?

A reminder: Cornyn is up for reelection in 2008. Why do we keep this hateful man in office?

(A special h/t to Bob Geiger for compiling the list of GOP senators who voted for all that trash, and to Avedon for reproducing more of Kennedy's speech. Both are linked above. There are so many bloggers on top of this issue that I can't begin to thank all of them who deserve it.)

Steve
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Information Density

Mr. Bush packed a lot of information into two sentences today:

Asked why he was going ahead with his plan without congressional support, Bush said, "One of the things I've found in Congress is that most people recognize that failure would be a disaster for the United States. And, in that I'm the decision-maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster."

That's impressive. In a mere two sentences, Bush managed to convey three things about himself:

• He doesn't listen well.
• He really believes he's king.
• He's incompetent at planning.

I am pretty good with words, but I'm not sure I could have managed that degree of information density. I suppose I'm just not as dense as Mr. Bush.

Steve
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No, I Won't Get Over It

Via Blanton's and Ashton's, in turn via OpEdNews.com, we find an AP article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer containing some of the best evidence yet that the 2004 presidential election was tampered with in Ohio:

2 election workers convicted of rigging '04 presidential recount
1/24/2007, 5:30 p.m. ET
By M.R. KROPKO
The Associated Press

CLEVELAND (AP) — Two election workers in the state's most populous county were convicted Wednesday of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes.

A third employee who had been charged was acquitted on all counts.

Jacqueline Maiden, the elections' coordinator who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee.

Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty. Both were acquitted of five other charges.

Rosie Grier, assistant manager of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board's ballot department, was acquitted of all seven counts of various election misconduct or interference charges.

The felony conviction carries a possible sentence of six to 18 months.

     ...

Ohio gave Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.

Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter, who was brought in from Erie County to handle the case, did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election — Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.

But Baxter insisted the employees broke the law when they worked behind closed doors three days before the public Dec. 16, 2004, recount to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand so they could avoid a lengthier, more expensive hand recount of all votes.

Ohio law states that during a recount each county is supposed to randomly count at least 3 percent of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are not discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be recounted by machine. A full hand-count is ordered if two random samples result in differences.

     ...

Fascinating... they may have done it, not to steal the election, but to save the county money, or to save themselves trouble. To this sorry condition our democracy has descended. Actually, though, I do not believe money was the only issue. Why? Read on...

The always essential BlackBoxVoting.org has much more on this incident and the recent convictions. There's no one "money quote" in their article; I'll just note three significant but unrelated points:

• The officials were caught red-handed... videotaped explaining how their nonrandom selection worked,
• The ballots arrived for the process presorted into Bush and Kerry stacks (oh, yeah, that's random),
• The audit proposed in the Holt bill would probably not have caught this "hack-and-stack" fraud.

We may never know who actually won the 2004 presidential election. But from all the evidence one can find at BlackBoxVoting.org, there can be little doubt there were multiple instances of fraud. America can either address these issues, or stop pretending to be a democracy. Which will it be?

Steve
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Friday Cat's-Eye Blogging

The eye color distortion so typical of an inexpensive camera, usually a real annoyance, gave Samantha and Tabitha a different color for each of their four eyes. I wish I'd had this picture to post for holidays. With cats' eyes like these, who needs strings of lights...

Steve
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The People Zapper

This is just plain wrong:

The US military has unveiled a space age 'non-lethal weapons system' – a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire.

The Pentagon claims that the Active Denial System, dubbed "the people zapper", is a harmless way to control rioters or get enemies to drop their weapons.

But experts in the UK and Germany questioned the system’s safety, warning that exposure to the beam for more than a few seconds could cause extensive and potentially life-threatening second degree burns.

Dr Steve Wright, of Leeds Metropolitan University, an expert on non-lethal weapons technology, said: "There is a great worry that these weapons will redefine existing standards of cruelty."

Military officials, however, said that the system could save the lives of innocent civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They said targets would flee the beam on reflex, avoiding sustained exposure.

During the first media demonstration of the weapon, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted on a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that US troops might encounter.

The crew fired beams from more than 450 metres away, nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.

While the quick burst of 54C heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

"This is one of the key technologies for the future," said Marine Colonel Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons programme which helped develop the new weapon.

     ...

Note that 450 meters is well over a quarter of a mile, and 54°C is about 129°F. This is torture at a distance, plain and simple.

The more I contemplate the much-praised class of "nonlethal" weapons, the more I think they are an invitation to torture. I have seen a number of specious arguments of this nature: "if in some circumstances we have a right to kill people, then we have a right to do something less drastic to them." Sometimes I've seen it cast slightly differently: "if we have a right to order our troops to die for their country, we have a right to order them to face anything other than death as well." I am sorry... no. There is never, under any circumstances, a right to torture, and there is most certainly never a right to direct a weapon of torture on a crowd.

Yes, I know; descriptions of this weapon have appeared before, on sites such as Defense Tech. Technically, it's old news. But I cannot think it is coincidental that the U.S. is unveiling this weapon at a time when Mr. Bush is escalating one war of aggression and may be about to begin another.

And I'm not at all confident the unveiling is intended to threaten our alleged enemies. This is a weapon that can all too easily be directed against civilians... including Americans. Put aside all the military applications for a moment and think how this weapon could be used on, say, a crowd of antiwar protesters.

Oh, but "they" would never do that, would they?

Steve
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The Democratic Response - UPDATED

Forget Bush's SOTU... don't we wish we could. I did not watch; I read the transcript. I don't have the money to replace my TV at the moment, and I am certain I'd have thrown things at it if I had watched all that B.S. in real time.

While we can't forget Bush's speech, there is one thing we can do: view Sen. Jim Webb's Democratic response. It is well-constructed, pointed, and quite specific in its criticisms of Bush's economy and especially his handling of the Iraq war. Webb himself, while no orator in the grand style, delivers the speech with obvious sincerity and from a position of personal as well as political strength. May all our congressional Democrats exhibit similar character and leadership. Paraphrasing Harry Truman, we don't need to give them hell... only tell the truth, take action with our newly granted power (never forgetting for a moment who gave it to us), and let Republicans think it's hell.

Webb's best quote was this one, in which he noted how two former Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, dealt, respectively, with corporate robber barons and the apparently endless Korean War:

Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.

Damned right we will.

UPDATE: According to Josh Marshall's inside source, Webb wrote the speech himself. Impressive. How much of Bush's speech... never mind.

Steve
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Charlie Rose 2-For-1 Science Video

Here is the Google video of Charlie Rose's pair of interviews, the first with physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard (whom I mentioned in an earlier post in connection with her book Warped Passages), the second with the venerable E.O. Wilson. Please watch both segments as these respected scientists pitch their recent books aimed at the general public.

Wilson's book, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion, is perhaps the more surprising, at least in the short term (in the very short term, it is out of stock at Amazon!), for Wilson's stated purpose in writing it: to enlist the evangelical Christian movement in saving Earth's biodiversity ("Creation" in the evangelicals' vocabulary). In this interview, he addresses two aspects of the evangelical movement, both of which I've noted myself:

First, a surprising number of them are amenable to learning about environmental matters if they can be placed in the context of "stewardship of God's Creation." Al Gore, while hardly a typical fundamentalist evangelical, has voiced this perception.

Second, by no means are all evangelicals raving radical Bush "conservatives," even if they are themselves religious conservatives. I know one who regularly votes Democratic, in large part because she perceives the nominal values of the Democratic Party as more closely aligned with the teachings of her religion.

Wilson addresses one more issue: while many evangelicals have been taught to see science as the "enemy," those he has spoken with appreciate his forthright approach of respect for their differences from his own outlook, and are willing to make common cause for their own reasons.

Regular readers here will note a similarity to my own views: while I could never participate in a religion that required me to compromise any aspect of my search for scientific knowledge through a wholly scientific approach, I am willing to stand side-by-side with anyone, of any faith or no faith at all, who shares my sociopolitical views, as long as neither of us cares where the other got the call to right action. Professor Wilson's purpose is admirable, and I wish him success in his effort. It won't be easy, but things are to the point at which something must be done. (Please pay close attention to the numbers Wilson cites... they're scary.)

Rose's interview with Randall involves both a lot of specifics about the subject matter of her book (I won't repeat myself there; please read my earlier post) and a fascinating discussion of the motivations of scientists, what they (and Prof. Randall in particular) hope to find, the state of particle physics today (including some developments likely to be just around the corner), and wild and not-so-wild speculations about the nature of the universe from the perspectives of string theorists (who work in a mathematical realm on phenomena not amenable to direct observation, possibly ever, because of their size and energy) and model-builders (the rest of theoretical physicists, who enumerate problems in the Standard Model and attempt to resolve them).

A warning to straight men and possibly lesbian women as well: Dr. Randall is very beautiful, and extremely animated in her enthusiasm when discussing her favorite subjects. Among those subjects is the construct called a "brane" (derived from "membrane"), a lower-dimensional slice or cross-section of a higher-dimensional space. Don't be surprised if you find yourself distracted by Dr. Randall's combination of... sorry; I can't resist, though I'm sure I'm not the first... beauty and branes.

Steve
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State Of The Union Undone

With all due respect to the late great Ann Richards and to Jeff Danziger... Bush is UNdone. And he has been his own undoing. It remains to be seen whether he is also the undoing of the Union.

Steve
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Quantum Elections?

I've been working my way through physicist Lisa Randall's Warped Passages (see LibraryThing for link) in an attempt to update my painfully out-of-date knowledge of the general shape of "theories of everything." Dr. Randall, who has held tenured positions at MIT, Princeton, and Harvard, writes well, and pitches her book at a level just below my passable but dated knowledge of physics. After the obligatory outline of the state of things and intended course of the book, Randall reviews the history of physics in a few chapters on Newtonian physics, special relativity, general relativity and quantum mechanics before plunging into newer concepts of spacetime, extra dimensions, branes and the bulk, strings etc. I highly recommend this book for someone just like me. Actually, if you have less mathematical background than I do, this book is still for you; Randall mostly waves hands and draws pictures, relegating sketches of the math to a section of end-notes.

This book is in no meaningful sense political. I have no clear sense of Dr. Randall's sociopolitical views, and I'm sure that's quite intentional... who wants politics in a popular physics work. But in the course of providing real-world context, in this case for the notion of comparing the unpredictable behavior of a single photon in the classic two-slit experiment vs. the statistically predictable result of sending a large number of photons through the slits, she offers the following paragraph, which I hope you find as amusing as I do. Please forgive typo's; I am hand-entering the text, and please remember this book is copyright ©2005, meaning it was probably written before the 2004 elections:

If you don't believe this one last photon is usually insignificant, think about how you feel when you go to the voting booth. Is it really worth the time and trouble to vote when you know that your vote can't possibly make a difference in the outcome, since millions of other people are voting? With the notable exception of Florida, the state of uncertainty, one vote generally gets lost in the crowd. Even though an election gets decided by the cumulative effect of individual votes, a single vote rarely, if ever, changes the result. (And, to take the comparison a step further, you might also observe that only in quantum systems -- and in Florida, which acts like a quantum state -- do repeated measurements produce different results.)

<grin />

Bryan, Mustang Bobby et al... does Florida offer a license plate that reads, "Florida: State of Uncertainty" or perhaps "Florida: The Quantum State"?

Steve
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Food And The Future Of Humankind

Most of you who read this blog regularly know that Stella and I are vegetarians (of the ovo-lacto variety, if it matters to any of you). It has long been a personal rule that I do not proselytize as a vegetarian... i.e., I do not try to persuade people as individuals that they should eschew meat (rather than chew meat) just because I do, or for the same personal reasons I do. Humans are by their biological nature omnivores; I have occasionally encountered people who would argue otherwise, but they have a tough row to hoe, or perhaps "a tough deer to hunt" would be a better metaphor. Humans by nature eat the flesh of animals. It is our good fortune also to be able to live entirely on food that does not require killing animals. Whether one chooses not to eat meat is very much a personal decision, and I try hard never even to imply that others should make the same choice I have made for the same reasons.

That said, I encounter a dilemma when some of my personal food-related issues bump up against basic environmental considerations and (separately) against agricultural practices which may endanger the very existence of humankind. In such cases, I feel free to speak out a bit more. Unlike your typical religious zealot (is there such a thing?), I am not trying to convert each and every one of you to subsisting on vegetables, dairy products and eggs because doing so is some sort of "one true way." Rather, I would hope that enough of you ultimately decide to do so, or at least to reduce your consumption of meat and dairy products produced by industrial agriculture, in the interest of sustainability and the avoidance of global warming.

Global warming? Did I really say global warming? Yes, I did. This column on the blog at Huffington Post, written by Kathy Freston, an individual who is herself not an expert in nutrition, sustainability, global warming or any such thing, gathers various threads, from a U.N. report to some research at University of Chicago, which taken together demonstrate something rather amazing. Two samples help clarify what it is:

     ...

Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.

     ...

Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the [Toyota] Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

     ...

I became a sprout-eater back in the early 1980s for personal health reasons. I came to find that other personal reasons sustained the decision. But damned if I thought I was saving the planet when I did so. The notion was not completely new to me... Francis Moore Lappé's splendid and (for many of us) seminal book Diet for a Small Planet outlines the basics of why being vegetarian is a socially and environmentally sound thing to do. But global warming hadn't entered the picture in 1971.

There is a not entirely separate issue of equal importance for the long-term survival of humankind: biodiversity.

Biodiversity of crops has in the past not been a major problem, as different regions and different societies raised different varieties of the thousands of kinds of corn, wheat or rice in existence, so that the failure of any one variety was not catastrophic to our survival as a species. This is no longer true. Monoculture often predominates in agriculture, and is reinforced by the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO or just GM), which have deliberately limited reproductive capability and are subject to patents owned by Monsanto and other major corporations.

This is a subject for another post, maybe many posts, but meanwhile, there is a movie, The Future of Food, that will give you an idea of the scope of the biological, social and political problems. The link is to a Google video of the movie, which is about an hour and a half long. I can't say you'll enjoy it, but I can say you'll probably watch it to the end. And all issues of meat-eating aside, it may just persuade you to change your purchasing habits at the grocery store... it certainly has done so for me. I'll have more on all of this in a later post.

Steve
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Saturday Signs

Loitering police are a problem at this CVS pharmacy?

Apologies for the reflective glare. I took about four shots attempting to get rid of it; at that point, the store manager emerged, exhibiting what I thought was an extremely crabby demeanor toward someone who had just bought a few items from her store. I'd watch out for her if I were one of those loitering police.

Steve
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The AG Is Still Gonzo

Add this to the list of Gonzo behaviors of our Attorney General:

• Attorney General Gonzales: There is no right to habeas corpus in the United States

And he's talking about the Constitution, not the MCA. Enough said.

Steve
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We're Not In A Position

... to answer any goddam question you ask. Thus spake the sadly misnamed Department of Justice.

TPMMuckraker.com provides the transcript of a telephone briefing of reporters by a couple of "senior Department of Justice officials" regarding the recent purported FISA ruling on NSA warrantless wiretapping. For the sake of your display, please stand back more than an arm's length from it before you read this. I'll provide you just a very few excerpts:

     ...

SENIOR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OFFICIAL: Well, again, I'm really not in a position to describe the classified details of the orders.

     ...

SENIOR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OFFICIAL: Again, I'm really am not in a position to describe the mechanics of the orders and to get into the details about what is or isn't available under the FISA statute, because it really does say something about the intelligence activities involved.

     ...

SENIOR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OFFICIAL: Let's just say I'm not in a position now to talk about the specifics of how things will happen under particular orders, because that really talks -- that really provides a lot of information about (audio gap) of what we're doing, the capabilities we have under the FISA statute.

     ...

SENIOR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OFFICIAL: I guess the general statement that we take full advantage of all the relevant case law. That includes our own approach to the statute. That includes rulings from the FISA Court. That includes significant precedents from the FISA Court, other related things. But I'm obviously not in a position to discuss every significant ruling that deals with FISA.

     ...

There's not a lot of content in between these statements, either.

So... what position are these "senior DoJ officials" in? My guess is "man-above missionary position" with respect to the American public.

The whole notion of a secret court ruling on secret activities is a great concession to security matters, a concession that infringes the very notion that judicial proceedings can be fair only when they are out in the open. To take matters a step further by alleging that not only may the proceedings in specific cases be held in secret, but the very rules under which these proceedings can take place are also unavailable to the public, is to take a big step toward facilitating tyranny. If you doubt this, let the following senior DoJ official's quote chill your spine:

I will say that these are complex orders, that the approach taken in the orders is innovative, as indicated in the Attorney General's letter. And I think beyond that, I'm not going to get into specifics.

All of you have a nice, "innovative" day.

Steve
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Friday Bob Dylan Blogging

Samantha has no idea who Bob Dylan is, but when she rolls around on her recently refreshed catnip mat, she could be about to sing...

Everybody Must Get Stoned ...

Detail (actually mostly de head and de front feet). Just look at those eyes...

GeeDubya says there ought to be limits to freedom, but I don't think Samantha is listening very well. "Don't bogart that 'nip, my friend..." (Yeah, I know; that's not Dylan.)

Steve
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The AG Is Gonzo

Or so it seems:

• Gonzales says judges unfit to rule on national security:

  WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales criticized federal judges Wednesday for ruling on cases that affect national-security policy. Judges, he contended, are unqualified to decide terrorism issues that he said are best settled by Congress or the president. / ... / In nominating a judge, "we want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments," Gonzales said in the 20-minute speech to American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. "That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national-security interests of our country."

  
  
• Gonzales: NSA Wiretapping Now Subject to Court Approval
  
  (TPM Muckraker makes the Gonzales letter to Leahy available at this link. Details are sparse, and now that hearings are underway, some members of Congress, including Heather Wilson (R-NM), are saying that Gonzales is lying. - SB)
  
  
• Dems to AG: How Many Prosecutors Have You Pushed Out?

  At an oversight hearing this morning, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) grilled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the sudden departure of several U.S. Attorneys at the administration's request.

  "How many U.S. Attorneys have been asked to resign in the past year?" Feinstein asked Gonzales.

  "You're asking me to get into a public discussion" of personnel issues, Gonzales replied.

  "I'm asking you to give me a number."

  "I don't know the answer to that question," said Gonzales.

  "You didn't know the answer when we spoke on Tuesday, but you said you would find out," Feinstein pressed.

       ...

  
  

So let me get this straight: Gonzales says courts are unfit to rule on national security matters; Gonzales is going to arrange for the FISA court to rule (in some as-yet-unspecified way, about which we will not be told) on the impact of a national security program on Americans' civil liberties; and Gonzales won't tell Congress why he is using an obscure provision of the PATRIOT Act (inserted by Arlen Specter) to replace experienced, generally highly regarded, Senate-confirmed federal prosecutors, some in the middle of, or in preparation for, prosecuting corruption cases, with Republican political appointees (not just any Republicans, but high-ranking party officials).

No doubt about it: the AG is Gonzo. Any other interpretation would require us to believe that Gonzales did not have the best interests of America's constitutional system of checks and balances at heart.

Steve
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Jane

Jane Hamsher's surgery should be beginning about the time I write this. Jane is one of the genuine stellar lights in our half of the blogosphere, and one of the great activists of our time. If you're the praying sort, please say a few for Jane. If not, think good thoughts in her direction... can't hurt; might help.

Steve
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Rick Perry's Southern Strategy

I'm of the opinion that you can tell a lot about a person by their choice of music and musicians. If that is so, Rick Perry's choice of Ted Nugent as the featured performer at Perry's inaugural ball speaks volumes about Perry:

     ...

Rocking the house as the night's final act was singer Ted Nugent, a friend of Perry's known as the "Motor City Madman." Nugent appeared onstage wearing a cut-off T-shirt emblazoned with the sure-to-draw-headlines Confederate flag and shouting some unflattering remarks about non-English speakers, according to people who were in attendance. His props were machine guns.

     ...

Perry's spokesman, Robert Black, downplayed the incident.

"Ted Nugent is a good friend of the governor's. He asked him if he would play at the inaugural. He didn't put any stipulation of what he would play," Black said. He added that "Most people had a really good time and enjoyed the show."

     ...

No doubt one could say the same thing... that "most people" had a good time... at lynchings, slave auctions, and other noted features of the old South. By contrast, in today's South, "most people" would probably be happy to see Nugent banned from performing at future state events. Indeed, "most people" who have been offended by the deplorable treatment of the Dixie Chicks by people who are probably Perry supporters would be hard put not to urge a total boycott of Nugent's concerts and recordings.

And "most people" who are less tolerant of racism than Rick Perry... by now it should be clear to them that racism is the right word... should never, ever let Rick Perry forget the incident.

Steve
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