Musings and rants about politics and geekery with a distinct Chicago flavor.
I’m blown away by Apple’s preview of Tiger. And not in a good way. Not in a good way at all.
Apple is now developing a substantial history of intellectual property theft from third-party developers. (Lest I be sued, on the laughable assumption that anyone from Apple would ever end up reading this blog entry, let me state outright that that sentence, and indeed this entire entry, is merely my opinion.)
Sherlock 3 was an obvious rip-off of Watson (scroll down to “What is the relationship between Watson and the new Sherlock 3?”), which was so good it was evidently was just sold to Sun. Panther’s Application Switcher is a direct rip-off of LiteSwitch.
And Tiger manages to rip off not only Konfabulator but LaunchBar as well, with its new releases of Dashboard and Spotlight, respectively. Hell, with Dashboard, they didn’t even bother to rename the term for the mini-programs — Apple’s calling theirs “Widgets,” too.
I really would like to see Proteron, Arlo Rose, and Objective Development take Apple to court on this one.
My ire is beginning to be raised. I will be looking quite skeptically at the concept of purchasing Mac OS 10.4. Right now, the only thing that is making me think about it is that evidently Tiger will introduce the use of metadata in the system, something I’ve been desiring for a while.
(Update: now with linky goodness.)
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My nightly postings of links were becoming a major, time-consuming project that would take a great deal of time out of my life. I sought to change things to shorten the time involved, and have done so. Unfortunately, this shift to a new system involves the end of my days at LiveJournal.
The linklog posting will continue, but courtesy of Del.Icio.Us. If you prefer webpage browsing, you can check my linklog at http://del.icio.us/WCityMike. If you prefer to read via syndication (such as NetNewsWire, etc.), you can subscribe to this feed.
I have created a weblog on Blogger called Musings of a Chicagoan for times when I’m in the mood to muse more at length. The Atom feed for that can be subscribed to here.
I hope that if you’ve enjoyed my links or my thoughts, you’ll make the transition to the new locales. Take care.
Update: has created a LiveJournal that works off my Del.Icio.Us syndication feed, which is called . Enjoy. 
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I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 at the local Century Theatres theater this afternoon. I was encouraged. This is, essentially, the widescale, publicized argument that I have been wanting the Democrats to make for the four years that Bush has been in office. Unfortunately, few Democrats stopped going ‘meep’ until an election year hit us, and then only because Howard Dean came in and made such a loud noise that the other Democratic candidates ran the risk of looking like wimps if they didn’t grow a pair.
One of my favorite moments of the film (don’t read any further if you’d like to be surprised) is Moore’s coverage of Bush’s flight suit escapade, where he took an F-16 out to an aircraft carrier, landed in a flight suit, and pronounced “mission accomplished.” Moore chose as background music the theme to the 1980s sitcom “The Greatest American Hero.” Well, the lead-in to the ‘believe it or not’ chorus is:
Look at what’s happened to me,
I can’t believe it myself.
Suddenly I’m up on top of the world,
It should’ve been somebody else.
What a delicious moment of irony. And the footage of Ashcroft singing his own composition, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was, as always, surreal.
Sometimes, blogs become huge and are read by thousands of people. Sometimes, they’re just written for the act of writing. The latter purpose is really what I’m writing this for. As I’ve grown into an adult, I’ve found that writing a private journal for myself really doesn’t seem to offer me any incentive. My brain sort of says, “Well, no one will ever read this except yourself, and you already know these thoughts, so, really, what is the use?” With public blogging, there is at least the illusion that I am trying to explain this to someone out there, even if I am really just speaking with myself.
This also differs somewhat in that this will only be the product of moments where I feel as if I want to express something. Prior attempts at blogging arose, at least in part, from the desire to impart links which I thought were of interest. That function is now being fulfilled by my linklog at Del.Icio.Us, to which I can toss a link and accompanying description with just the touch of a keystroke. Very convenient!
This is also the product of some reading I’ve been doing — a book called From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. It is by a person named Fred Anderson, who, apparently through sheer strength of will, transformed his eating habits and dropped from a high of 371 pounds down to 195 pounds. His online journal (I’d offer a link, but it’s no longer online, since it’s essentially the substance of the book) details the mental attitude he took, and it’s a fascinating one. I agree with some critics that a lot of his thought patterns may come from other motivational gurus’ philosophies, but it feels more like distillation than plagiarism.
I’m also working with some software called Life Balance, which is a really excellent “to do” application. I can schedule things to recur a set time after I check them off, or every Saturday, and I can also prioritize tasks and effort. It’s a bit hard to describe it all in one whack, but as a review of it said, text editor is to Microsoft Word as to-do application is to Life Balance.
Anyway, that’s enough for a first post — I have other stuff to get to.
I should let you know, by the way, that I am listening to an MP3 of Phish doing a “James Brown” version of Hanson’s “MMMBop,” and despite having heard it a number of times, it still brings a smile to my face.
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Hey, readers o’ my LiveJournal.
I have been trying to figure out a way that I could possibly do the whole blogging thing a little easier, so I’m going to briefly try a tweak to my blogging lifestyle, based on this journal entry, which seems to echo my own style and mental processes.
So, possibly temporarily (possibly permanently), I’m moving the operation over to Delicious.
Webpage, and RSS feed.
(There’s nothing there this second, because I haven’t gotten home tonight and started my usual blogging.)
It could be that I will then use the LiveJournal for stuff I want to rant more at length about (and or quote deeply from), and Delicious for the one-shot more “linklog”-type stuff.
We’ll see.
By the way, I’ve temporarily opened up commenting to everybody (whether you’re a LiveJournal user or not), and if you read me (either on the RSS feed or on LJ or through your ‘friends’ view), would you please mind just dropping a comment? Implementing a counter appears to be an extreme pain in the neck with the customizations I’ve got set up, and I’m curious how much of a readership I’ve got. (If you’re a jerk and decide this’d be a great time to start trolling me, keep in mind LiveJournal logs your IP address.)
— Mike
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A little bit saddened to hear this:
The Washington Post noted the sloppy dress habits of the mourners who filed into the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, “perhaps America’s most sacred secular site,” to pay respects to President Reagan.
“[Some of the mourners wore] flip-flops, cargo shorts and T-shirts, their flabby midsections exposed,” noted the Post. “Some young women wore ultra-mini skirts and halter tops.”
Really disrespectful.
Not surprised to hear this:
Ann Coulter, the arch-conservative commentator who looks like the kind of woman who shows up at bachelor parties with a raincoat, high heels, a boom box and a bodyguard, wrote a column about the passing of Ronald Reagan.
So how many paragraphs did Coulter manage before she turned her tribute to Reagan into an attack on liberals?
Answer below.
[...]
The answer to the Coulter quiz: She made it through one whole paragraph lauding Reagan before launching the l-word:
“America’s greatest president has gone home. God worked through Ronald Reagan on Earth and now He’s taken him back. . . . Thanks to him, the United States … never ceased to be, as Reagan said, ‘a place to escape to’ — the last stand on Earth.
“No thanks to liberals, I might add. More enraging than their revisionist history of Reagan is liberals’ revisionist history about themselves. Now liberals claim they liked Reagan at the time. This is extremely believable –aren’t we all fond of someone who regularly exposes us as liars, cowards and hypocrites? It’s just human nature.”
If we could channel this woman’s hatred of liberals into an energy source, it could light the Vegas Strip for a decade.
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Okay, damn it, that’s really cool. George H.W. Bush celebrated his 80th birthday by frickin’ skydiving from 13,000 feet. The winds were too strong for him to do it alone, so he jumped in tandem with a member of the U.S. Army parachute team. That’s just frickin’ cool, I gotta say. Skydiving at 80 … hat’s off to you, George. (Evidently Gorbachev came to visit him for his BD.)
Here’s another neat story:
MLB.com
June 13, 2004 7:20 pm ET
Sanders sends ‘em home happy
By Alan Eskew
ARLINGTON — Reggie Sanders did not play Sunday for the Cardinals, but for many of the 41,087 in attendance at Ameriquest Field, he was the hero of the day.
In the third inning, Gary Matthews Jr. of the Rangers fouled a ball into the seats and a burly man leaped over a row, knocking over a 4-year-old boy with his legs, and grabbed the baseball.
The incident was caught on television cameras and the fans began to chant for the man to give the boy the ball, but he refused. Sanders saw what had occurred on a television in the clubhouse. In between innings, Sanders came out and summoned the boy and his mother to near the Cardinals’ dugout and gave him a bat and ball as the crowd cheered.
“It was definitely an unfortunate situation,” Sanders said.
Sanders said the bat was one he had used in a game.
“I won’t talk about the guy,” Sanders said. “He’s not worth talking about.”
Cards reliever Steve Kline also witnessed the incident on television and sent the man over a gift, a Cardinals shirt, which he signed, “tough guy and ball stealer.”
The shirt, however, was never delivered. The unidentified man left the premises soon after Sanders’ good-will gesture and could not be found.
Class act, Mr. Sanders. Class act.
I’m sorry, I just love this photo. Heh. McCain just looks like every other guy, goin’, “Oh, man, am I bushed.”
The International Red Cross says that the U.S. has to either charge Hussein or release him by the time we hand over Iraq to the new provisional government.
Huh. Something I learned in Boy Scouts was wrong: if the flag touches the ground, it doesn’t have to be burnt.
Dollar store toothpaste can evidently be very troublesome.
You know you’re in trouble when government legislation begins to sound like horror movies. Such as The Return of the Son of PATRIOT:
The bill, known as the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003, or HR 3179, was introduced last September by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) and was co-sponsored by Rep. Porter Goss (R-Florida), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a possible contender to replace departing CIA chief George Tenet.
It contains four sections that first appeared in a proposed piece of legislation dubbed Patriot Act II. That proposed law was discovered last year by the Center for Public Integrity just weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Patriot Act II, or “Son of Patriot” as critics called it, was written by the Justice Department to expand Patriot Act powers, but the department was forced to shelve the proposal after news of it created an uproar.
But critics, like conservative former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), say that rather than abandoning the legislation altogether, the department has been extracting provisions and having sympathetic lawmakers slip them one by one into new bills to pass the legislation piecemeal. At least five other bills pending in Congress also contain provisions from Patriot Act II, but HR 3179 is the one that’s in imminent danger of being passed under the radar.
Last year, a Patriot Act II provision was slipped into the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2004 at the last minute and passed quickly before legislators opposed to it had time to fully examine it. The Intelligence Authorization Act, an annual bill that allocates funds for intelligence agencies, is a must-pass bill that generally gets drafted and passed quickly in secrecy.
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This weekend, I caught the Joe Schmo Show marathon on SpikeTV, and really enjoyed it. After a little bit of Googling, I found this excellent Slate article that described very well how I felt about the show. I’ll definitely be giving the sequel a try.
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Oh, boy:
In a cellular telephone interview, Tomo Razmilovic told Zoran Sagolj of the Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper Thursday that he might return to the U.S. after taking a two- or three-week holiday on a yacht off the coast of his native Croatia.
Yeah, I know you want to lock me up … I’ll be back in, oh, say, three weeks, ‘kay?
Signal Orange.
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I don’t think I’ve linked to this one yet, and if I’ve not, it’s amazing. Ashcroft refuses to turn over the infamous ‘torture’ memorandum to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they actually grow a pair. The footage is absolutely amazing. Sen. Biden is my new hero.
I created an iMix based on RetroCrush’s 50 Coolest Song Parts.
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. It’s so simultaneously funny and sad.
It looks like Ralph Nader is pulling votes only from John Kerry, despite what he says — enough that, again, he’s going to give the Presidency to Nader. If he does, frankly, he’s going to be the target of some real intense hatred. Take a look at these poll results, if you don’t believe me.
Speaking of John Kerry, listen to his old rock ‘n’ roll band, The Electras.
Evidently, the plane carrying Kentucky’s governor to Ronald Reagan’s funeral in Washington had a transponder malfunction, which “led air traffic controllers to report an unauthorized plane in the large restricted airspace over Washington” (photograph, article):
In the Rotunda, where the former president was to lie in state, an army officer ran in yelling, “Evacuate the building now.” Uniformed military officers started running, heels clicking on the marble. Senators also ran.
Police told women to take off their shoes and run. If people dropped items, they were told to leave them. Some officers even loudly counted down the minutes to “impact.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s move like our lives depend on it. I mean it!” a Washington, D.C., police officer shouted as lawmakers and staffers poured into the streets.
Police hustled House Speaker Dennis Hastert — second in line to the presidency — away in a secured motorcade. Across the street, at the Supreme Court, several justices were whisked away in cars as an alarm sounded and officers yelled, “To the basement, to the basement.”
You may remember that we have not seen all of the torture photographs from the Abu Gharib prison. From someone who has: “You haven’t begun to see evil … horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”
If we’re ever going to advance as a people, we’re going to have to start making a serious effort to learn when to let shit go.
They have found an animal in the woods of North Carolina that even mammalian experts can’t identify (with photograph).
This is kind of cool.
This is rather impressive. An online comic artist says, “Listen, you idiots who keep sending me nasty e-mails. Send me a year’s salary, and I’ll quit my job and pay attention to you.” Well, they sent him a year’s salary.
This movie trailer for Hunting the President talks about how Clinton was brought down. It’s obviously heavily biased, but it’s nevertheless whetted my interest.
You have to love the image they used with this advertisement. Yes, the perfect use of a voice changer is when a man with a creepy, homicidal look on his face is calling a bunch of a teenage girls.
From the Museum of Hoaxes:
It’s prom time, and parents of seniors at Newfield High School all received a letter in the mail ffering their child a free ‘protection package’ comprised of condoms and lubricant to help them celebrate the night in a fun, but safe, way. The letter was a prank, and a very successful one if judged by how much it managed to annoy school authorities. The School Superintendent fumed that the prank demonstrated “inexcusable and reckless behavior that diminishes every student in the senior class.” I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the reaction the pranksters were hoping for.
Naperville, it turns out, has an extremely stupid law on the books. If you are 21 or younger and in the presence of someone else underage who is drinking, then you are in violation of Naperville’s presence restriction ordinance. Those morons do not seem to comprehend that the U.S. Constitution applies to teenagers, as well, too. They can be convicted when they do not do anything illegal, but the person next to them does?
The least erotic moments in cinema history. I’ve seen Showgirls and agree with them on that scene.
Oooooh. Want to buy a replica of the very first Encyclopedia Brittanica? (However, I really can’t see spending money on this, given all the other stuff I’d rather purchase. Still, I’d love to browse through this, or check it out of a library somewhere.)
If you’re a Tarantino fan and/or a Star Wars fan, you might enjoy Imperial Dogs. It’s not up yet, but the schwag they have up at the moment looks fun.
10 foods you should never eat. God knows I’ll probably never pop open a bag of Bugles again (or if I do, I’ll know exactly what I am eating).
This is amazing: a credit card with a 65% annual interest rate.
Evidently, the famous homicidal killer Son of Sam has a blog. Okay, life is officially disturbing.
FARK Photoshop Contest: What do Trek actors do in the off season? Quite funny.
The movie Garfield is getting some of the worst reviews in history — its Rotten Tomatoes page shows that about 91% of the nation’s critics think it sucks. My favorite quote is by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s critic, who says, “This isn’t a movie, it’s a marketing ploy.”
However, I’m surprised that The Stepford Wives isn’t getting better reviews — it’s only at 32%. I saw it last night and loved it. Favorite quote on that page is: “Rudnick’s screenplay is filled with smart dialogue and funny pop-culture references, including some well-observed parodies of reality TV programming.”
This is a pretty interesting article about a sleep machine that a Japanese company is developing. They seem much more concerned about their employees’ energy level than most American companies. Here’s more:
At the “Vitality Diagnostic Corner,” a “sleep counselor” leads visitors through a 30-minute, Matsushita-developed software program designed to pinpoint sleep problems and put out a “sleep profile.”
With that out of the way, customers are free to pass into a separate bedroom and get down to business with the sleep machine.
The 30-minute session in the sleep room — about the size of a small hotel room and programmed with a control panel in the wall — starts with the bed upright like a recliner. A huge TV screen is positioned high above the dresser to meet perfectly with your line of vision, showing verdant scenes of a river ambling through a forest.
Gentle guitar and piano music plays against a backdrop of trickling water and birdsong.
After a few minutes relaxing like that, the sleep machine takes over: the lights slowly dim, the TV screen goes blank, the music dies down — but the stream still babbles — and the bed lowers into sleeping position.
Hold onto the sheets for what comes next: a mechanical massage. The mattress vibrates and bulges strategically under your upper and lower back, stretching your spine to its limits.
Eventually, the lights turn off completely, the massage peters out and air is released from the mattress, allowing your body to settle gently into place — and into the first dream of the night.
The sleep machine eases you out of your dreams as well. The lights come on slowly and the TV turns on with a crystal lake on the screen. The curtains open automatically to morning, and the bed lifts you into sitting position.
In an effort to get the PATRIOT Act renewed, evidently the Bush Administration is outright fibbing about efforts to reduce it:
The 30-second spots suggest that proposed changes to the Patriot Act would bar federal agents from using new surveillance and investigative powers against terrorists that it claims are “routinely” used against common criminals. In actuality, the main Patriot-fix bill, supported by conservatives and liberals alike, called the Security and Freedom Ensured, or SAFE, Act would simply narrow several of the Patriot ActÃs most contentious provisions, requiring greater judicial review and more checks against abuse. Nothing in the act would eliminate the secret search and surveillance powers authorized or expanded in the Patriot Act.
Lest you think we as a species have progressed beyond it, a family was turned away from a New Jersey pool because they were black.
A state Department of Justice went around confiscating licensed, legal guns. Even though I’m not precisely wild about an armed citizenry, if they did this, it was an obvious and blatant violation of the Second Amendment.
This, however, I don’t quite understand the huge hubbub about. After all, if I have to provide a thumbprint to cash a check, why shouldn’t I be required to provide one when purchasing something that could kill someone? It doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, frankly. Then again, it does create a slippery slope. More and more thumbprinting could become suddenly “reasonable,” such as when buying a car (to prevent car fraud and/or hit-and-runs). And then where do we go from there?
The Memory Hole, the website which posted photographs of our servicemen coming home (as well as the Iraqi abuse photographs, is being blocked from soldiers’ computers as “politically extremist.”
Um, maybe it’s not a great idea to transmit credit card numbers on an unsecured WiFi network:
According to statements provided by Timmins and Botbyl following their arrest, as recounted in an FBI affidavit filed in the case, the pair first stumbled across an unsecured wireless network at the Southfield, Michigan Lowe’s last spring, while “driving around with laptop computers looking for wireless Internet connections,” i.e., wardriving. The two said they did nothing malicious with the network at that time.
It was six months later that Botbyl and his friend Salcedo hatched a plan to use the network to steal credit card numbers from the hardware chain, according to the affidavit.
As Declan points out, GIMP could pretty much just laugh in the EU’s face:
Computer and software manufacturers are to be forced to introduce new security measures to make it impossible for their products to be used to copy banknotes. The move, to be drafted into European Union legislation by the year end, follows a surge in counterfeit currency produced using laser printers, home scanners and graphics software. Imaging software and printers have become so powerful and affordable that production of fake banknotes has become a booming cottage industry.
And now, the criminalization of art under the PATRIOT Act begins.
Sounds good to me!
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Wow. Anna Nicole Smith lost a lot of weight.
Looks like Jack Chick has another hate-filled cartoon tract out, this time on gay marriage. (He even wrote an accompanying letter.) As long as you know what you’re getting into, they usually make a pretty interesting read, if only for psychological purposes and knowing what the ultra-fundies are spreading ’round.
Just realize that this stuff is written in a completely alternate, very askew universe.
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*guffaw* (And I’m so glad I’m male.)
Evidently, a kid put his school up on eBay. The plus side? The school administrators actually had a sense of humor about it.
What a wonderful bit of theater:
I spend this morning reading the transcript of the AG’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, and I think this exchange with Pat Leahy perfectly captures the Abbott and Costello quality of it:
LEAHY: Has there been any order directed from the president with respect to interrogation of detainees, prisoners or combatants, yes or no?
ASHCROFT: I’m not in a position to answer that question.
LEAHY: Does that mean because you don’t know or you don’t want to answer? I don’t understand.
ASHCROFT: The answer to that question is yes.
Lysenkoism.
“ChristianExodus is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of dissolving that State’s bond with the union.” Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, then.
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“Is it … boiling hot?”
How do they do that?
Once in a while, you run across a website that you hope to God is some sort of social commentary-style parody. (Edit: Yeah, evidently it is parody. Thank God.)
See lizard. See lizard jump on news anchor. See news anchor do something hilarious (WMV).
Jesus. This is just what we need:
Test subjects can’t see the invisible beam from the Pentagon’s new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds.
People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.
What do you think of this ad they’re considering broadcasting on Arabic television? I frankly don’t think it’d be a bad idea.
Can someone make this for Congress, please? It’s really pretty damn cool. (Take a look at the entry for my uncle and aunt’s member of Parliament, if you’d like to see how it works.)
Here is an incredibly well-written editorial about this crap known as a “free speech zone” and its effects on Wisconsin during Dubya’s campaign trip:
The Capital Times
May 13, 2004
When King George Travels, Liberties Suffer
By John Nichols
The King made a royal visit to Wisconsin last week, and as is common when monarchs travel, individual liberties were suspended.
King George Bush’s bus trip across western Wisconsin closed schools and roads, prevented residents from moving freely in their own communities, and prevented citizens from exercising their free speech rights.
All in all, it was a typical George W. Bush visit.
But there’s a slight twist.
People in western Wisconsin, who hold to the refreshingly naive notion that they live in a republic as opposed to an imperial realm, are objecting.
“There’s a pattern of harassment of free speech here that really concerns me,” says Guy Wolf, the student services coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “If they’re going to call it a presidential visit, then it should be a presidential visit - where we can hear from him and he can hear from us. But that’s not what happened here, not at all.”
Wolf and other La Crosse area residents who wanted to let the president know their feelings about critical issues came face to face with the reality that, when King George travels, he is not actually interested in a two-way conversation.
Along the route of the Bush bus trip from Dubuque to La Crosse, the Bush team created a “no-free-speech” zone that excluded any expressions of the dissent that is the lifeblood of democracy. In Platteville, peace activist Frank Van Den Bosch was arrested for holding up a sign that was critical of the president. The sign’s “dangerous” message, “FUGW,” was incomprehensible to children and, no doubt, to many adults. Yet, it was still determined sufficiently unsettling to the royal procession that Van Den Bosch was slapped with a disorderly conduct ticket.
Up the road in La Crosse, the clampdown on civil liberties was even more sweeping. Wolf and hundreds of other Wisconsinites and Minnesotans who sought to express dissents were videotaped by authorities, told they could not make noise, ordered not to display certain signs and forced to stand out of eyesight of Bush and his entourage. Again and again, they were told that if they expressed themselves in ways that were entirely protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, they would be “subject to arrest.”
“Everyone understood the need for basic security for the president, but none of us could understand why we had to give up our free speech rights,” explained Wolf.
La Crosse Mayor John Medinger shares that concern. The Bush-Cheney campaign leased a portion of a local park where the royal rally was held. Yet, Wisconsinites who wanted to protest Bush’s visit were told they could not use a sound system in a completely different section of the park.
“I want to find out why the whole park was used when only a portion was leased,” Medinger told the La Crosse Tribune. “So when demonstrators were told they couldn’t have (sound) systems, the question is why.”
The Bush-Cheney campaign paid a $100 fee to use one part of the park, but disrupted much of the city. Medinger is now assessing the full cost of the royal visit and hopes to deliver a bill to the campaign, which State Elections Board attorney George Dunst says the Bush campaign should pay. Other communities, including Prairie du Chien, are looking at following Medinger’s lead.
But the challenge should not just be a financial one. The Bush visit attacked First Amendment rights up and down the Mississippi. A lot of people are owed apologies.
In a monarchy, of course, the King never apologizes. But in a democracy, the president is supposed to be accountable to the people.
By pressing demands that the charges against Frank Van Den Bosch be dropped and that the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign apologize for participating in an anti-democratic endeavor, residents of western Wisconsin can, and should, take up the cause of this country’s founders. It is time once more to challenge a King named George.
Ooooh. I like this site.
The City of Baltimore is running into a problem: their people are kinda lazy about throwing away e-mails, their e-mail servers are collapsing, but public record laws are governing exactly how they can empty things out.
You may not have heard it, but America, bit by bit, city by city, is telling Washington, D.C. (via legislation!) that the Patriot Act can go fuck itself.
A humorous Wired news article about Lawrence Lessig looking at his inbox and quietly going, “Holy shit.”
The blogger has a point — but man, to do that takes more than a little chutzpah, assuming he’s conscious of it (how could he not be?).
A really interesting column by a wife who remembers the days when Michael Jackson was normal, and ponders the transformation. Worth clicking through for the day pass.
You should read this article, despite its length. If you don’t want to read the whole thing (behind the cut tag), then at least read this and this.
Wall Street Journal
Monday, June 7, 2004
Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture
Security or Legal Factors Could Trump Restrictions, Memo to Rumsfeld Argued
by Jess Bravin
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners.
The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified “secret” by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013.
The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful. But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than “obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens,” normal strictures on torture might not apply.
The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or “superior orders,” sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no “moral choice was in fact possible.”
According to Bush administration officials, the report was compiled by a working group appointed by the Defense Department’s general counsel, William J. Haynes II. Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. It isn’t known if President Bush has ever seen the report.
A Pentagon official said some military lawyers involved objected to some of the proposed interrogation methods as “different than what our people had been trained to do under the Geneva Conventions,” but those lawyers ultimately signed on to the final report in April 2003, shortly after the war in Iraq began. The Journal hasn’t seen the full final report, but people familiar with it say there were few substantial changes in legal analysis between the draft and final versions.
A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture — to assert “presidential power at its absolute apex,” the lawyer said. Although career military lawyers were uncomfortable with that conclusion, the military lawyer said they focused their efforts on reining in the more extreme interrogation methods, rather than challenging the constitutional powers that administration lawyers were saying President Bush could claim.
The Pentagon disclosed last month that the working group had been assembled to review interrogation policies after intelligence officials in Guantanamo reported frustration in extracting information from prisoners. At a news conference last week, Gen. James T. Hill, who oversees the offshore prison at Guantanamo as head of the U.S. Southern Command, said the working group sought to identify “what is legal and consistent with not only Geneva [but] … what is right for our soldiers.” He said Guantanamo is “a professional, humane detention and interrogation operation … bounded by law and guided by the American spirit.”
Gen. Hill said Mr. Rumsfeld gave him the final set of approved interrogation techniques on April 16, 2003. Four of the methods require the defense secretary’s approval, he said, and those methods had been used on two prisoners. He said interrogators had stopped short of using all the methods lawyers had approved. It remains unclear what actions U.S. officials took as a result of the legal advice.
Critics who have seen the draft report said it undercuts the administration’s claims that it recognized a duty to treat prisoners humanely. The “claim that the president’s commander-in-chief power includes the authority to use torture should be unheard of in this day and age,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York advocacy group that has filed lawsuits against U.S. detention policies. “Can one imagine the reaction if those on trial for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia had tried this defense?”
Following scattered reports last year of harsh interrogation techniques used by the U.S. overseas, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asking for clarification. The response came in June 2003 from Mr. Haynes, who wrote that the U.S. was obliged to conduct interrogations “consistent with” the 1994 international Convention Against Torture and the federal Torture Statute enacted to implement the convention outside the U.S.
The U.S. “does not permit, tolerate or condone any such torture by its employees under any circumstances,” Mr. Haynes wrote. The U.S. also followed its legal duty, required by the torture convention, “to prevent other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture,” he wrote.
The U.S. position is that domestic criminal laws and the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments already met the Convention Against Torture’s requirements within U.S. territory.
The Convention Against Torture was proposed in 1984 by the United Nations General Assembly and was ratified by the U.S. in 1994. It states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that orders from superiors “may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”
That prohibition was reaffirmed after the Sept. 11 attacks by the U.N. panel that oversees the treaty, the Committee Against Torture, and the March 2003 report acknowledged that “other nations and international bodies may take a more restrictive view” of permissible interrogation methods than did the Bush administration.
The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture.
A military official who helped prepare the report said it came after frustrated Guantanamo interrogators had begun trying unorthodox methods on recalcitrant prisoners. “We’d been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them” so officials concluded “we need to have a less-cramped view of what torture is and is not.”
The official said, “People were trying like hell how to ratchet up the pressure,” and used techniques that ranged from drawing on prisoners’ bodies and placing women’s underwear on prisoners heads — a practice that later reappeared in the Abu Ghraib prison — to telling subjects, “I’m on the line with somebody in Yemen and he’s in a room with your family and a grenade that’s going to pop unless you talk.”
Senior officers at Guantanamo requested a “rethinking of the whole approach to defending your country when you have an enemy that does not follow the rules,” the official said. Rather than license torture, this official said that the report helped rein in more “assertive” approaches.
Methods now used at Guantanamo include limiting prisoners’ food, denying them clothing, subjecting them to body-cavity searches, depriving them of sleep for as much as 96 hours and shackling them in so-called stress positions, a military-intelligence official said. Although the interrogators consider the methods to be humiliating and unpleasant, they don’t view them as torture, the official said.
The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration’s view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.
“In order to respect the president’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign … (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority,” the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in the original document.) The Justice Department “concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president’s constitutional power,” the report said. Citing confidential Justice Department opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised that the executive branch of the government had “sweeping” powers to act as it sees fit because “national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress.”
The lawyers concluded that the Torture Statute applied to Afghanistan but not Guantanamo, because the latter lies within the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and accordingly is within the United States” when applying a law that regulates only government conduct abroad.
Administration lawyers also concluded that the Alien Tort Claims Act, a 1789 statute that allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts for violations of international law, couldn’t be invoked against the U.S. government unless it consents, and that the 1992 Torture Victims Protection Act allowed suits only against foreign officials for torture or “extrajudicial killing” and “does not apply to the conduct of U.S. agents acting under the color of law.”
The Bush administration has argued before the Supreme Court that foreigners held at Guantanamo have no constitutional rights and can’t challenge their detention in court. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on that question by month’s end.
For Afghanistan and other foreign locations where the Torture Statute applies, the March 2003 report offers a narrow definition of torture and then lays out defenses that government officials could use should they be charged with committing torture, such as mistakenly relying in good faith on the advice of lawyers or experts that their actions were permissible. “Good faith may be a complete defense” to a torture charge, the report advised.
“The infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture,” the report advises. Such suffering must be “severe,” the lawyers advise, and they rely on a dictionary definition to suggest it “must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.”
The law says torture can be caused by administering or threatening to administer “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the sense of personality.” The Bush lawyers advised, though, that it “does not preclude any and all use of drugs” and “disruption of the senses or personality alone is insufficient” to be illegal. For involuntarily administered drugs or other psychological methods, the “acts must penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him,” the lawyers found.
Gen. Hill said last week that the military didn’t use injections or chemicals on prisoners.
After defining torture and other prohibited acts, the memo presents “legal doctrines … that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.” Foremost, the lawyers rely on the “commander-in-chief authority,” concluding that “without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president’s ultimate authority” to wage war. Moreover, “any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president,” the lawyers advised.
Likewise, the lawyers found that “constitutional principles” make it impossible to “punish officials for aiding the president in exercising his exclusive constitutional authorities” and neither Congress nor the courts could “require or implement the prosecution of such an individual.”
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
The report advised that government officials could argue that “necessity” justified the use of torture. “Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law,” the lawyers wrote, citing a standard legal text, “Substantive Criminal Law” by Wayne LaFave and Austin W. Scott. “In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person … so long as the harm avoided is greater.”
In addition, the report advised that torture or homicide could be justified as “self-defense,” should an official “honestly believe” it was necessary to head off an imminent attack on the U.S. The self-defense doctrine generally has been asserted by individuals fending off assaults, and in 1890, the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. deputy marshal’s right to shoot an assailant of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field as involving both self-defense and defense of the nation. Citing Justice Department opinions, the report concluded that “if a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate criminal prohibition,” he could be justified “in doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.”
Mr. LaFave, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said he was unaware that the Pentagon used his textbook in preparing its legal analysis. He agreed, however, that in some cases necessity could be a defense to torture charges. “Here’s a guy who knows with certainty where there’s a bomb that will blow New York City to smithereens. Should we torture him? Seems to me that’s an easy one,” Mr. LaFave said. But he said necessity couldn’t be a blanket justification for torturing prisoners because of a general fear that “the nation is in danger.”
For members of the military, the report suggested that officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.” Examining the “superior orders” defense at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Vietnam War prosecution of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre and the current U.N. war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the report concluded it could be asserted by “U.S. armed forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.”
The report seemed “designed to find the legal loopholes that will permit the use of torture against detainees,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international-law professor at the Ohio State University who has seen the report. “CIA operatives will think they are covered because they are not going to face liability.”
Interesting comment in a Village Voice editorial:
Starting with the way he broke the air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, an augury of things to come from which the labor movement never recovered, Reagan certainly demolished the American left—what passes for the left, anyway. Since repeating “what passes for the left” strikes me as tiresome, I’ll abbreviate it: WPFL. As you may recall, under veteran station manager Jesse Jackson, WPFL switched to an oldies format soon after the Great Communicator took office, and has remained too much on the defensive to come up with a new songlist since. Instead, in one of the great through-the-looking-glass paradoxes of Reaganism, “progressives” have become, in practical terms, reactionaries—cluckingly trying to protect this or that milestone (equal opportunity, Roe v. Wade), against a right wing that’s singing “If I Had a Hammer—Oh, Wait: I Do.”
After seeing Dean’s campaign get tossed into the dumpster, I have to admit, I see what the guy’s talking about.
The website October Surprise has a poll going about what we should expect in October 2004 from Dubya & Company.
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We all owe it to ourselves as Americans to read this British journalist’s story of how forgetting to apply for a special “journalist’s visa” now required under the PATRIOT Act ended landing in her in some incredibly unpleasant and unjust conditions in George Bush’s America.
It’s happened. The RIAA has out-Onioned themselves:
Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.
Ronald Reagan passed away today. I wasn’t really politically conscious when he was President; I was ages six through 14. Iran-Contra strikes me in retrospect as bad, but I didn’t really experience it, if you know what I mean. I’ll never forget this speech of his, though. He suffered from Alzheimer’s, as my grandmother did. As my sister pointed out in a telephone conversation this evening, she was really the first President we both remember having. I don’t really ‘remember’ Carter’s presidency; when I was six or younger, I really didn’t bother myself with Presidencies …
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Remember yesterday’s entry, when I told you about Bradbury going wackadoodle about the title of Fahrenheit 9/11 being derived from Fahrenheit 451? Blogger Brian Dear points out that Bradbury has no ground to stand on, given I Sing the Body Electric (title taken from a Walt Whitman poem), Something Wicked This Way Comes (title taken from Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth), and others.
Nigritude Ultramarine. Pass it on.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t want Congress to know much about our latest contract with Boeing.
A woman’s husband died, and she went to cancel his cell phone contract. The rest has to be heard to be believed:
After Julie McMurry’s husband died last summer, Verizon Wireless told the Enumclaw, Wash. woman that she would have to pay an early termination fee on his cell phone contract. “I said, ‘This isn’t an arbitrary thing, I’d be glad to fax you a copy of the death certificate. The man’s dead.’”
The Verizon rep said McMurry could either pay the fee or give the phone to another family member.
The news article ends rather humorously:
Cell phone troubles even dogged the reporting of this story.
Twice spokespeople for different wireless companies called on cell phones whose signals faded to silence.
And here is another fun little ironic article:
June 04, 2004 5:26:01 PM IST
Woman’s petition to save post office gets lost in the post
In an ironic twist of events, a woman’s 10-000 name petition to save a post office from closure got lost in the post.
According to The Mirror, Linda Atkin of Wincobank, Sheffield, collected 10,000 signatures over a period of ten days to save the neighborhood post office.
She posted the document by recorded delivery to the decision makers, only to be informed that it never reached its intended destination.
To add insult to injury, after the Royal Mail apologized for not being able to locate the mail, they sent her a book of 12 stamps as compensation.
“It is a joke. We feel absolutely gutted. We did all that work to try to save our post office and thought it was a case of sitting back and waiting for the outcome. Now they say they don’t even know where our petition is,” the report quoted an enraged Linda as saying.
A fun Photoshop contest: insert C-list celebrities into A-list movies.
Someone who claims to have invented the Walkman (but sounds to me as if he is a skillful con artist) is, oddly enough, suing Apple for the iPod.
A fascinating Village Voice article on a proposed ban on taking photographs on the New York City subway.
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This is one of the most amazing Flash animations I’ve ever seen.
Neil Gaiman tells you “How to Survive a Collaboration.”
I’m not sure how to feel about this ancedote. On one hand, I can actually understand the viewpoint of the agents. On the other hand, it does feel like a massive overreaction.
If you live in Illinois, you may not be able to vote for Bush, thanks to the Republicans’ choice of timing for their convention. Yeah, I don’t think that will actually happen, either, but it’s nevertheless … interesting.
Ray Bradbury recently gave a wackadoodle interview to a Swedish newspaper in which he went nuts at Michael Moore calling his film Fahrenheit 9/11, saying, “Michael Moore is a screwed asshole,” and that he “is a horrible human being.” He assures us that “[n]obody will see his movie” and “[t]he people there hate us, which is why they gave him the d’Or. It’s a meaningless prize.”
This‘ll drive you nuts.
Did you know that Shel Silverstein wrote the lyrics of the Johnny Cash hit “A Boy Named Sue“?
Damn.
“Everybodykitty was kung-fu fighting … “
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What a great photograph.
Evidently, George H.W. Bush pushed Bill Clinton at the World War II Memorial dedication ceremony.
Evidently Jewish dietary laws and NYC water aren’t exactly compatible at the moment: turns out New York City water isn’t kosher, as they have copepods in it.
Instapundit, a conservative blogger, decides he’s not necessarily against genocide:
Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide — unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That’s what happens when two societies can’t live together, and the weaker one won’t stop fighting — especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger.
This and other blogosphere horrors here.
A very interesting and well-written article written by the woman who was accused of having an affair with John Kerry.
I was watching a cult classic called UHF today (”Weird Al” Yankovic’s film), and read something interesting in its trivia entry on the Internet Movie Database. Evidently, Orion Pictures thought that it was going to be their blockbuster hit when it was released in July 1989. Unfortunately, three other films happened to be released against it at the same time: three little art films called Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon. Imagine Godzilla crushing a car with its foot, and you get the idea.
Evidently, Jessica Cutler, a mailroom clerk for Sen. DeWine (OH), was being paid for sex by a number of anonymous government officials. Things came to light because she blogged this. Amazing. I must admit, I really don’t see the attraction.
The Army has told their soldiers that even when their committment is up, they won’t be able to leave.
This is a little funny. An Arabic newspaper took a photograph from a Worth1000 Photoshop contest and used it as the basis of an article saying that mankind’s been shrinking since Adam. More here.
David R. Gillespie: the most hated man in New Jersey.
An amusing moment with Jason Kottke and a French tourist.
Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, 7-Up. What do you call these fluids? Pop, soda, or coke? Depends on where you live in the country … first ran into that when I moved from Illinois to New Jersey, and people wondered what the hell I was talking about when I wanted some pop.
An interesting commentary on perspective. Here they’re just talking about computers, but the principles could well apply to almost anything.
GOD, CHRIS, YES! RIGHT ON! I trained my spam software to treat those kinds of messages as spam.
At first glance, I thought to myself, “It’d be pretty cool if they implemented this in Chicago.” Then I realized, How distracting would it be for reading, talking, or whatever else you do on the subway to have a big flickering commercial ad showing in the window?
PC World awards their Newcomer of the Year award to Apple’s iTunes! Sez PCW:
Apple makes Windows apps about as often as Microsoft ships bug-free products, and if iTunes for Windows is any indication, that’s a crying shame.
You’ll probably enjoy this — the 2004 Republican convention event schedule. (Not really. And not a good read for actual Republicans and/or fans of the current Administration. But a concatenation of some of the best zingers I’ve read lately.)
A good example of Bush being flatly found to be lying.
A hilarious FARK Photoshop contest, especially this one.
Evidently, “Fahrenheit 9/11” now will show in American theaters. Good.
Interesting … but exorbitantly pricy.
It’s the Nielsen TV Research Activity Book — color your way to proper kiddie demographics.
The Memory Hole is a website that is known for posting interesting documents usually obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. They were, for example, responsible for showing some of the photographs of military caskets coming home from the war. It’s done with little political comment. Evidently, however, the military blocks his website as political extremism.
Those pesky kids are doing stuff for free that we want to charge ‘em money for, demmit!
Evidently, the Mac Design Conference had a little bit of humor in it.
An article by Wired about how to improve e-mail.
“Twelve questions for President Bush meant to help strengthen his remaining speeches about Iraq.”
Evidently, when they ate legs in “Alive,” it was actually tofu.
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