Joyous Day

I can't believe what I just read!

I can't wait for this guy's memoirs/deathbed confessions. Who will be our generation's Woodward and Bernstein and hound him all the way to the grave?

I would like to read something into the timing of this resignation, but they're all just too secretive to speculate about what, if anything, it means. Oh well. I can imagine just about anything other than that he's actually feeling the heat of congressional investigations; he has too defiantly thumbed his nose at oversight of any kind for that to be a plausible theory. Perhaps, for the very first time, he is telling the honest truth: with the new democrat-controlled Congress, there is simply nothing left for him to do. He and his ilk have wielded near-absolute power for a long time, but now there is nothing to do but stem the tide of the reversal of their abuses, and frankly that's not very exciting. Anything is drudgery compared to playing a modern Rasputin, so who could blame him for walking out on a high note?





The Onion weighs in.



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Seniors Ignorant, Study Finds

From WaPo. The headline is "Test Finds 42% of Seniors Proficient in Economics."

Check out this clown's response:

While there is clear room for improvement, the results are not discouraging," said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees policy for the NAEP tests, in a statement before a news conference in Washington this morning. "Given the number of students who finish high school with a limited vocabulary, not reading well, and weak in math, the results may be as good as or better than we should expect.

Yeah, good point. Since they don't seem to be learning jack shit anyway, we shouldn't pressure them to learn this specific shit. Better to keep them homogenously uninformed. Idiot.


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Good Going

WTF, mate?

"You won't need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you assholes because you said you were against shit like this."



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Gonzo's Last Gasp

This is really the only defense left for him:


Oddly, I've pretty much had it with calls for Gonzo's head. It's not that he doesn't deserve it, it's just that it is now clearly a lost cause and a waste of precious legislative time and effort. He's not going to resign, Bush certainly isn't going to make him, and while even Republicans in the House and Senate are happy to verbally condemn him, nobody's going to orchestrate his political lynching (how typical of the Dems not to shove when pushing is nonplussed). So at this point, heaping scorn upon Gonzales actually plays right into the White House's strategy. Libby-like, they have designated a whipping boy who will dutifully absorb his flogging and deflect the outrage from where it rightfully belongs. (He will be well compensated in the end, we presume.) Don't give them what they want. Brand Gonzales the idiot and liar that he is, and move in to other examples of malfeasance. There's plenty of criticism to go around, and it's not fair or wise to let Gonzo become the lightning rod for the manifold transgressions of his employers, in much the same way that the Libby conviction (even if it had had teeth) was ultimately a vacuous appeasement given the depth of corruption that his scandal embodied.

This is funny too:







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Non

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Holy @&*$%*#@$*)@#$

Fox News has published an article that pretty much concedes the point on global warming! Like the Catholic Church and Galileo, there comes a point when, in the face of mounting evidence, you simply cannot maintain a credible denial of the manifest truth.

Of course, it is no secret that Fox was going to come to the not-so-dark-side on this issue. Rupert Murdoch has personally acknowledged, on the record and on at least a few occasions, that global warming is a fact. He is, after all, not an idiot; he's a sociopath. And like any smart, profit-minded asshole, he is well aware that his viewers are idiots, and he has given them what they wanted: fodder for arguments with the evil leftists who have concocted this conspiracy as part of their plan to prevent the second coming of Jesus.

One of the vaunted defenders of the skeptic position (mentioned in this article, as well as pretty much every other climate change article, since there are only a handful of credible scientists who contest the consensus) is Richard Lindzen. He is a great candidate since he is evidently quite free of industry ties and his reputation as a scientist is impeccable. But what's interesting is that he's not quite the champion of anti-anthropogenic warming that editorialists would have him be. In fact, he mostly falls in line with the consensus position, though he would probably deny that adamantly. And though he has stated that he predicts a 50-50 chance of the earth actually cooling over the next 20 years, he doesn't seem to believe that with conviction. He's willing to bet it 50:1 odds, which sounds like a pretty damn good argument for the global warming position to me.

Here is a good piece on William Gray, one of the other prominent skeptics mentioned in the article. There's no stubbornness like an old codger's stubbornness.


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Pushing the Envelope

I finally got around to reading this excellent article. A few notable excerpts:

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning.

What else would you expect from a VP who is, according to his unusual interpretation of the constitution, simultaneously a member and yet not a member of both the executive and legislative branches?

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress -- for Cheney's claims of executive supremacy and for his unyielding defense of what he called "robust interrogation."

But a more careful look at the results suggests that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many of the harsh measures he championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.
(snip)

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential directive for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to avoid a ban on cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

How extreme? Yoo was summoned again to the White House in the early spring of 2002. This time the question was urgent. The CIA had captured Abu Zubaida, then believed to be a top al-Qaeda operative, on March 28, 2002. Case officers wanted to know "what the legal limits of interrogation are," Yoo said.

This previously unreported meeting sheds light on the origins of one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims. The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and therefore permits many others. [Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure ..... or even death."

What does this have to do with Cheney?

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line into torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That's not radical, it's unthinkable. There is NO legal justification to suppose that anyone, including the president, can simply disregard a law. And if there were any reason to claim that executive authority could supersede certain congressional actions, it would not apply to an international treaty.

Another bit:

Even so, Cheney's losses were not always as they appeared.

On Oct. 5, 2005, the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor of McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, which included the Geneva language [Read the bill]. It was, by any measure, a rebuke to Cheney. Bush signed the bill into law. "Well, I don't win all the arguments," Cheney told the Wall Street Journal.

Yet he and Addington found a roundabout path to the exceptions they sought for the CIA, as allies in Congress made little-noticed adjustments to the bill.

The final measure confined only the Defense Department to the list of interrogation techniques specified in a new Army field manual. No techniques were specified for CIA officers, who were forbidden only in general terms to employ "cruel" or "inhuman" methods. Crucially, the new law said those words would be interpreted in light of U.S. constitutional law. That made a big difference to Cheney.

The Supreme Court has defined cruelty as an act that "shocks the conscience" under the circumstances. Addington suggested, according to another government lawyer, that harsh methods would be far less shocking under circumstances involving a mass-casualty terrorist threat. Cheney may have alluded to that advice in an interview with ABC's "Nightline" on Dec. 18, 2005, saying that "what shocks the conscience" is to some extent "in the eye of the beholder."

There is much more amazing content on Cheney's expansive and iron-fisted rule over policy. Read it all. Here is some good commentary with links to appropriate further reading.




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News

Not related, but too funny:



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Neato

Here is a very good article on some neat studies in evolution. We have been able to observe the results of evolution for quite a while, and we have also been able to examine microevolution, or the change in gene frequencies in a population, for a fair amount of time. But only recently have we begun to correlate specific mutations and groups of mutations with their evolutionary function at higher levels (like, say, social behavior) and that is REALLY exciting. Kudos to the author for giving a suitably sophisticated treatment of a complex subject.


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Orthodox Paradox

Read this. It is a beautiful exploration of the difficulty of reconciling religious belief to modern, secular morality. It is also a very sensitive and personal account of someone who has rejected the fundamentalism of his birth community in favor of a more inclusive worldview. Jews can be fundamentalists too.





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