Fiat Lux

Another move by BushCo that is just so wrong it's not even funny....

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it was unwilling to set free or turn over to U.S. or foreign courts, the Washington Post said in a report that cited intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

Some detentions could potentially last a lifetime, the newspaper said.

OK, so there's no real evidence the people in question have done something bad, or even that they were planning on doing something bad. There's nothing that could be used in court to actually put them on trial for any actions they might have taken. But still, we should lock them up in a camp for the rest of their lives because somebody at the CIA thinks they MIGHT be a danger?

So, so wrong.

If we can't PROVE in a court of law, or even at a tribunal of some sort, they're a threat, we should not be holding them at all.

After spending the past sveral weeks trying to decide what laptop to buy, hunting around for a good deal, and then trying to bring myself to actually spend the money, I went ahead tonight and ordered a new Dell Inspiron laptop for school.

it's a good thing that I have a hard time spending money on myself. Dell has a habit of changing their prices every week, and by waiting two weeks I cut about $50 off the final price of the system, plus got a bit better bang for my buck by way of a slightly larger screen.

Here's the configuration I ordered:

Dell Inspiron 1150
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.80GHz
15-in XGA screem
Windows XP Pro
512 Mb RAM
40GB HD
8x DVD-ROM
Built-in wifi, modem, and network cards
Extended cell battery
1 year warranty

And all for under $1,000.

Given the limited budget I had to work with, I think I got pretty good bang for my buck. The tradeoff I'll be making is this laptop is no lightweight; it will weigh in at close to 8 pounds. Still, I'm pretty psyched.

The WaPo has some actual numbers as to projected Social Security cuts. If you're under 35, better start planning now for alternate methods of funding your retirement; you can pretty much kiss being able to live on Social Security goodbye.

One of the reasons why I'm blogging less about politics these days is that I feel an overwhelming sense of my own uselessness. Nothing I say is going to make BushCo actually have to pay the price for the various outrages they've pereptrated.

Take the torture issue, for example. It will be no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but the NY Times is runing an article today showing that, in fact, Abu Ghirab was not an isolated case of a few rogue soliders, but rather part of a broad pattern of abusive behavior that began at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and spread from there. The FBI knew what was going on, and at least some cases was none to happy about it. But they were unable to have an impact on the process.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.

For example:

In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show.

"You won't believe it!" the agent wrote.

Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect," he wrote, according to the documents, "it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness."

Read the rest of the article. It's an ugly, ugly story, but I am completely sure that the only people who will ever pay a price for this gross and unethical abuse of power will be low-ranking soliders and perhaps one or two mid-level officers. The people who formulated and approved this policy will never have to do anything worse that perhaps make a statement to the prress that any abuses were not intended and are regretted.

Of course, we ALL pay a price when terrible things are commited in the name of America. But BushCo doesn't seem to care about that.

So as I said, it's been harder for me to feel like blogging about politics. Why should I bother? Nothing I can say or do is going to change things. The best I can do is try to add one more small voice of outrage to the chorus and hope that somehow it's going to help.

Well, this is a nasty piece of work that Delegate John A. Cosgrove (R) of Chesapeake is trying to enact into law over in the Virginia legislature.

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the law-enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of which the delivery occurs within 12 hours after the delivery. A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor.

As Democracy for Virginia graphically points out, this means if you live in Virginia and suffer a miscarriage, you're a criminal if you don't call the police to report that fact within the first 12 hours afterwards.

Adding insult to injury, as D4V puts it,

Suffering a miscarriage is no crime, but Delegate Cosgrove wants to make it a crime for a woman to fail to violate her own privacy in the first 12 hours after a miscarriage, so let’s look at his proposed penalty.

Cosgrove's bill says, "A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor."

Let's see. What other crimes are punishable as Class 1 misdemeanors in Virginia? A cursory Google search reveals just a few...
- A person 18 years of age or older engaging in consensual intercourse with a child 15 or older not his spouse, child or grandchild (more commonly known as "statutory rape")
- burning or destroying a building or structure if the property therein is valued at less than $200 (arson)
- a bomb threat made by someone younger than 15
- carrying a concealed weapon while under the influence of drugs or alcohol
- possession or distribution of fraudulent drivers’ licenses or official identification
- stalking
- threatening any public school employee while on a school bus, on school property, or at a school-sponsored activity
- purchasing or providing alcohol to minors

So, Delegate Cosgrove is basically saying that failing to violate your own privacy within 12 hours of a miscarriage is the criminal equivalent of statutory rape, arson, stalking, and other serious crimes.

The authorized punishments for convictions for a Class 1 misdemeanor in Virginia are "confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2500, either or both."

If a state thinks it would be useful to have some sort of collection mechanism to gather information about miscarriages and abortions rates, I don't object to that basic concept. But this isn't the way to do it. It's a sledgehammer of a law, amazingly insensitive and far too intrusive. That 12 hour reporting window is ridiculous, and the amount of data they're asking for (again, see D4V's rundown for details) is too much. And the punishment does not even remotely fit the 'crime'.

In today's Republican America, though, it's just par for the course.

UPDATE: The bill was later withdrawn. Score one for the good fight.

On a rainy and chlly Friday, Tommy and Gimli can be found seeking out the warmth to be found on (or near) the top of my monitor.

More fodder for the tinfoil hat brigade -- but even so this is almost certainly unconstitutional and ought to be overturned if signed into law:

Usually, 218 lawmakers - a majority of the 435 members of Congress - are required to conduct House business, such as passing laws or declaring war. But under the new rule, a majority of living congressmen no longer will be needed to do business under "catastrophic circumstances.'' Instead, a majority of the congressmen able to show up at the House would be enough to conduct business, conceivably a dozen lawmakers or less. The House speaker would announce the number after a report by the House Sergeant at Arms. Any lawmaker unable to make it to the chamber would effectively not be counted as a congressman. The circumstances include "natural disaster, attack, contagion or similar calamity rendering Representatives incapable of attending the proceedings of the House.'' The House could be run by a small number of lawmakers for months, because House vacancies must be filled by special elections. Governors can make temporary appointments to the Senate. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), one of few lawmakers active on the issue, argued the rule change contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which states that "a majority of each (House) shall constitute a quorum to do business".

Good luck to the PeopleSoft people about to become jobless. Layoffs are reported to hit as early as this week.

Oracle is expected to cut 80 percent of sales jobs and up to 90 percent of administrative jobs at PeopleSoft, but keep the bulk of its research and development team

Ouch.

It's official - there are no WMDs in Iraq and the people sent to find them have come home.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

But instead of saying, "we were wrong, there were no WMDs", you'll never hear a word of regret coming forth from BushCo.

So what's the answer? What should a responsible press do when faced with a president who baldly lies over and over about stuff like this [Social Security] in a blatant attempt to scare the hell out of people? Somebody needs to figure it out, because people like George Bush have no incentive to stop lying if the press lets them get away with it.

Edit - forgot to source this: Kevin Drum.

It was another "be at work at 4:30 AM" day so I'm too tired to think much right now. Per Pandagon, here's the 10 random songs that my iTunes gave forth on Shuffle:

Baubles, Bangles, and Beads - Kismet (Original Broadway Cast)
All Night Long - Lionel Richie & The Commodores
And Suddenly There Was With The Angel - Handel (Messiah)
With This Love - Peter Gabriel (Passion Music for The Last Temptation Of Christ)
Take Me to the River - Talking Heads
Virtual Reality - Rusted Root
Poems, Prayers And Promises - John Denver
Too Early For The Sky - Johnny Clegg & Savuka
Take Another Piece Of My Heart - Faith Hill
In The Still Of The Night - Neville Brothers (Red Hot + Blue, A Tribute To Cole Porter)

I do actually listen to stuff written after 1995, but random chance didn't pull any of it into this list.

Who said this?

"For too long, too many people dependent on Social Security have been cruelly frightened by individuals seeking political gain through demagoguery and outright falsehood, and this must stop. The future of Social Security is much too important to be used as a political football."

If you guessed President Ronald Reagan, you'd be right.

The Gipper was right about that one.

The Rude Pundit has a really good take on the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. It's worth a read (unless you're at work and your employer has a profanity filter in place). Here's a snippet:

Democrats oughta take a look at King beyond his having had a dream and his having been to the mountaintop and his having been assassinated. Because King knew - he f---ing knew - that one thing that made him a leader of the disenfranchised is that he spoke their language. Even as those around him believed (and some still believe) that King made a mistake in his expansion of his movement, King knew that no one is truly free until we all are free. He had to bring whites into the movement on a broad basis or the fight was never going to end. He had to undercut the trump card of the powerful in their ability to divide the underclasses, and that meant owning the rhetorical God to the point that whenever God is mentioned, the automatic association is with the civil rights, economic justice, and anti-war movements (think of how successful the right is in the use of the word "Christian").

Clear Channel Communications Inc. on Wednesday said it converted three stations to a liberal talk format and this year could double to 44 the number of stations carrying such programming.

After offering mostly conservative-leaning talk for the past decade, Clear Channel and other broadcasters are now embracing "progressive" talk to woo a listener base that is growing increasingly fragmented due to satellite, Internet radio and devices like iPods.

The nation's biggest radio operator said it switched underperforming stations in Washington, D.C., Detroit and Cincinnati carrying nostalgic or sports programming with talkers like Jerry Springer, Ed Schultz, Lionel, Phil Hendrie, Randi Rhodes and Al Franken.

[snip]

In other efforts to reinvent itself, Clear Channel is cutting down on commercials and is converting 1,000 stations to high-definition digital broadcasting in the next three years.

HD radio will enable radio broadcasts to achieve "near-CD" quality and allow two or even three digital audio streams to be broadcast using a single carrier frequency.

If Clear Channel sees that there's a market for 'liberal' talk radio, then that is a good sign for the future, in my book. And the digital move is also an interesting one.

Supposedly it's the "hook 'em, horns" of the Texas Longhorns, but who knows for sure. It's definitely not a very Presidential thing to do.

Dare I say, dynasty? The Patriots stomped the Steelers tonight and are going to the Super Bowl again.

YAY!

Apparently the city of San Francisco, where I reside, is considering imposing a bag tax on grocery bags in an attempt to "eliminate waste" and recoup some of the costs of waste management.

As a shopper on a budget, I'm pissed off. Scott and I generally go grocery shopping two times a month, and we tend to stock up on stuff when we go. Our groceries get packed into anything from 8 to 12 bags - some of them double-bagged to take the weight. My rough calculation is that this new tax would cost us about $6 a month. And that's just the cost for our Safeway trips. It goes higher when you add in the odds and ends we pick up from other local stores, runs to the greengrocer, etc. All told this bag tax could cost us $100 a year. That's not chump change anymore. Especially when I've just cut back my work hours for school.

Big grocery stores will also hate this because it will slow down their lines and increase their labor costs. If they have to count exactly how many bags are used for each customer and then charge for them, you won't be able to close out one transaction and start the next one until after all the groceries are bagged. Plus, self-bagging will no longer be an option unless you bring all your own bags. That's workable when all you're buying is a few items, but not when you're buying two weeks' worth of stuff.

And need I point out that this is a classic regressive tax? People with even smaller budgets than ours will be hit harder by this.

It's great that the city of San Francisco is trying to be a good manager of our natural resources, but this is a crappy way of doing it.

Per Yahoo News:

A group of nationalist Russian lawmakers called Monday for a sweeping investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.

In a letter dated Jan. 13, about 20 members of the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, asked Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate their claims and to launch proceedings "on the prohibition in our country of all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations as extremist."

Just because a handful of legislators proposes something doesn't mean it's going to happen, of course, but still, quite disturbing to see.

If you ever doubt that one person can't do anything to change things, here's an example to the contrary, albeit not necessarily a very positive one:

A fire that began with a homeless person trying to keep warm by igniting wood and refuse in a shopping cart has crippled two of the city's subway lines, which might not be restored to normal capacity for three to five years, officials said today.

The Sunday afternoon blaze in Lower Manhattan was described as the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room that is no larger than a kitchen but contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits that transmit vital information about train locations.

"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," said the president of New York City Transit, Lawrence G. Reuter. He estimated that it would take "several millions of dollars and several years" to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays on which the two lines rely.

In the meantime, long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm on the A and C lines.

[snip]

In a statement, the transit agency said there were "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."

If I were still living in my old apartment in NYC this would have directly affected me; the Spring Street C/E station was half a block from me and I took the C several times a week.

Markos and the gang over at Daily Kos are taking a stand on Alberto Gonzales' nomination for the post of Attorney General. In light of my post earlier today about making a difference, sign me up, too.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales's legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law's undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales's actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.

Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: "After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should 'judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.'" We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the Senate to reject Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, "[t]he world is indeed watching." Will the Senate condone torture? Will the Senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

Signed,

Fiat Lux

Yesterday was my first day of classes at USF. I've spent part of this morning sorting through all the handouts I got yesterday and trying to get a handle on exactly how much time getting all my homework done is going to take.

I'm taking four courses this semester; two "quant" courses (Decision Modeling/Data Analysis and Accounting) and two "soft" courses (Leadership Dynamics and Management Communications). The 'soft' courses will be slightly easier in that I am a little more comfortable writing papers than I am crunching numbers, but either way it's going to be a lot of work.

I've already got a paper due Tuesday and about 8 chapters of preliminary material to read through, and two classes have yet to meet this week. I've committed to working 3 days a week, which leaves me the other 4 to go to my classes and get all my work done. I should be able to manage, but it's going to be pretty exhausting.

One of the things USF pushes hard is diversity and the study group I'm in for my Leadership class is pretty darn diverse. Of the five members, one is fresh off the airplane from India, another is from Thailand, and a third is from the heartland of Indiana. Then there's me, the Jewish gal from NYC, and another girl who has lived in a number of different parts of the US. It should be interesting to see how we all work together.

On the not so bright side, I noticed that one of my professors takes what seemed to me to be gratuitous swipes at evolution/Darwin in his course notes. As much as I like to ignore the fact, I am indeed attending a Jesuit school, and I need to remember that at least some religiosity is to be expected. Hopefully I'll be able to go on ignoring it most of the time.

So SBC is trying once again to acquire AT&T (or what's left of it). I suspect the deal has a much better chance of being approved today than it did the last time SBC tried this, and if it does go through, I'll be sad. It's extremely rare that a corporation lasts as long and becomes as well known as AT&T, and seeing it finally join the scrapheap of dead brands would be noteworthy. And the final irony, of course, is that the acquirer is a corporation that was spun off from the old AT&T in the first place. In a way I suppose that is appropriate.

As a shareholder, I should be happy. My AT&T stock has gone from being a significant piece of my portfolio to a pile of more or less worthless spinoff stocks. I never sold it off more our of nostaliga than anything else -- a bad reason to make an investment move, I know.

I'm less concerned with whether or not the Iraq elections get held as much as I am with what happens after the elections. That said, Juan Cole has a couple of excellent posts about the past 48 hours in Iraq, particularly this one, that are worth a read.

Today's must-read link is Ezra Klein on the politics of branding.

Although Democrats have often been called the party of identity politics (in the sense that a significant part of Democratic party politics has been built around a coalition of 'identity blocs' such as women, gays, Latinos, etc), Ezra contends that actually it's the Republicans who have done a much more complete and successful job of it:

Over the past 30 years, Republicans have successfully merged identity with politics, the importance of which is almost impossible to overstate. When your party affiliation becomes enmeshed with your sense of self, attacks on your candidate become attacks on your person, and thus ends any hope of being convinced out of your position. No longer are you dealing with policy or evaluating arguments, now your personal defenses are up, your worth is being called into question, and the rightness of your original position is transcendentally important.

And he's got a really good point. One big problem with identity politics as practiced by Democrats has been that it has not yet managed to promote a sense of overall party unity.

In some ways the Republicans have had it easier. Their membership is not very diverse, so it's easier for them to create that feeling of commonality that has allowed so many republicans to feel their political identity is a part of their core self. Democrats have not done a very good job of convincing people that, say, a working-class Latino union member and a tenured gay university professor have a true common cause despite all the surface differences. It's certainly not an easy job, but it's more and more obvious that it is a vital one.