Warm front

Very breezy in the district today - maybe the meteorological effect of so much hot air about to roll in?

Not so bad after all

Digby does a good job explaining what just happened, and why it isn't a horrifying defeat that only 25 Senators voted to filibuster Alito, but actually represents a turing of the tide of sorts. He makes the case that this is a sign that the blogs and grassroots, who pushed heavily in the last week for a filibuster that seemed unlikely, are becoming more effective:

The last time we had a serious outpouring from the grassroots was the Iraq War resolution. My Senator DiFi commented at thetime that she had never seen anything like the depth of passion coming from her constituents. But she voted for the war anyway. So did Bayh, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Kerry and Reid. The entire leadership of the party. Every one of them went the other way this time. I know that some of you are cynical about these people (and ,well, they are politicans, so don't get all Claud Rains about it) but that means something. Every one of those people were running in one way or another in 2002 and they went the other way. The tide is shifting. There is something to be gained by doing the right thing.

Go read the rest - it's worth it, especially if you're feeling wounded over all this.

Healthcare as immoral

This is a disturbing trend:

More than a dozen states are considering new laws to protect health workers who do not want to provide care that conflicts with their personal beliefs, a surge of legislation that reflects the intensifying tension between asserting individual religious values and defending patients' rights.

I'm interested to see where this is going. In some respects, it could be good, if the religious right were to be satisfied in not being forced themselves to give treatments their members find objectionable. Kinda along the lines of, "Don't like abortion? Don't have one." But the thing is, lots of people who don't share those beliefs live in areas where almost everyone else does, which would translate into a denial of necessary, legal treatments simply because of cultural geography. That would suck. I think it's where they're really trying to take it - they want to be able to prevent medical practices of which they do not approve within their local communities, through a combination of either being all the doctors and pharmacists, or using intimidation on non-crazy health professionals who would no longer be armed by the justification that they must provide legal procedures. I think the result will be lots of unnecessary pain and anguish in these communities.

And if that weren't enough, the Post gives us one more bit to worry about:

Others worry that health care workers could refuse to provide sex education because they believe in abstinence instead, or deny care to gays and lesbians.

"I already get calls all the time from people who have been turned away by their doctors," said Jennifer C. Pizer of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who is representing a California lesbian whose doctor refused her artificial insemination. "This is a very grave concern."

Na na na na can't hear you na na na na na

How mature:

Israel, meanwhile, ruled out peace talks with a Hamas-led government, saying it could not negotiate with an administration that included an armed group dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state.

OK, so the government is going to be led by Hamas. No way around that now. Should have worked harder to support the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority while you had the chance, fellas. Way too late to complain. Way, way too late to back out, which would look especially bad in response to what's being hailed as one of the most democratic elections in the Middle East in recent memory.

SGAC's new campaign

The Student Global AIDS Campaign has launched a new Treatment Access (Tx) campaign, and they've got a fancy new kit to go along with it.

SotU plans

I'll be chilling with some blogger at the Center for American Progress office.

Porky pigs

Good to see that the Abramoff scandal is still in the news, along with other general corruption stuff. From the Post:

In the latest example of these backstage dealings, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) told The Washington Post that he helped steer defense funding, totaling $37 million, to a California company, whose officials and lobbyists helped raise at least $85,000 for Doolittle and his leadership political action committee from 2002 to 2005.

Why do congresspeople give out so much for so little, when they could rightly hold out for more, given the amounts of money they control? I blame poor math education in our schools.

Cleveblogging

Susan has an interesting challenge to Peter B. Lewis, Cleveland business mogul and uber-donor turned crotchety-old-Scrooge, over at her self-titled blog. I wonder whether Lewis himself is totally deserving of the criticism, as he does run a company that is known for being good to its employees (including those I know), but the wider problem of non-profits being funded by finicky, patronizing billionaires is surely worth correcting. Non-profits have real, important, community-sustaining work to do, and we should find a better mechanism than the whims of the rich to finance it.

Higher edupayment

I blogged previously about Stanford on iTunes, and I'm proud that I covered it before Slashdot and Macrumors. The Slashdot post notes an interesting detail that I didn't fully discuss - the iTunes U service is being used by Standford to give away recordings of lectures for free.

There are 31 weeks of classes in Stanford's academic calendar (excluding the summer quarter). With a tuition cost of $31,200, and an average lecture load of 8-10 per week, this means Stanford students pay about $100 to $126 per lecture, if their tuition is to be understood as payment for instruction.

MIT, another prestigious and expensive institution, similarly gives away instruction, through its OpenCourseWare program (though they seem too cheap to provide us with spaces in the name). That both of these schools are willing to freely give their instruction to anyone interested and online may be a good sign for the more equitable access to education, but it belies a reality that many in higher education may be less proud of:

When you pay the high tuition of an elite school, all you're really buying are grades and a fancy degree.

Some might question this, posing the benefits of classroom interaction as a great deal more important than lecture materials, and as a real thing of value for which tuition is compensation. Fair as this argument is on its face, a growing answer to it lies in the fact that the MIT program allows students to comment and discuss the material online; while not equal to real-time, physical classroom presence, I suspect technology will improve the remote educational experience, especially as more universities move into the market of online degrees.

The question for the future, then, is whether we will sustain our class-defined and class-perpetuating system of employment-through-degree as conferred by expensive educational institutions, or if instead the real ability of anyone to share in the education ostensibly guaranteed by such degrees make them less necessary. Could there exist a world in which everyone had an MIT-educated understanding of physics, for instance, but only those with resources sufficient to pay for a degree get recognized for that education? I suspect not, and that free access to education may have destabilizing effects on our weighted meritocracy, if we let it.

AIDS on Slashdot

Looks like some good news reported over in nerdland. Some scientists have found the 3D structure of HIV, while others have induced bacteria into creating a protein that blocks HIV infection in monkeys.

More on mouse and lamp

This, from the Times analysis of the Disney-Pixar deal, is a bit off:

In particular, Mr. Nathanson and others noted, there is the widespread sentiment within the industry that the success of the iPod has benefited Apple and Mr. Jobs far more than it has the music labels, which do not share in the lucrative sales of iPod units.

Hmm. What if that read:

In particular, Mr. Nathanson and others noted, there is the widespread sentiment within the industry that the success of the phonograph has benefited GE and Mr. Edison far more than it has the music labels, which do not share in the lucrative sales of phonograph units.

Well, it wouldn't read like that because there were no music labels to bitch at that point. Technology created the niche in which they exist. If they weren't wasting time whining and suing kids and grandmas, maybe they would have created a digital business plan on their own, and would be reaping fatter rewards by now. The thing is, Apple had to invent online music purchases for them (and also had to go out and almost singlehandedly create the demand for said pay downloads). My guess is that if the music industry exists in the future, it will be due to Apple's work, in much the same way that Edison's was necessary for its creation.

Mouse, meet lamp

So looks like the rumors were true, and Disney really will buy Pixar.

Steve Jobs, CEO of both Pixar and Apple Computer, is now the largest individual stockholder in Disney. As one slashdotter put it, this is not the first time a startup he's run has been purchased by a much larger, failing company. And we all know what happened last time.

Can't say I'm not worried about Apple being so closely tied to content creation, as Disney owns a lot of stuff. Hasn't been so good a thing with Sony.

Network news

UPN and the WB will be sewn together into some CBS-Warner Frankenstein, to be called CW.

In other news, Atrios apparently digs Veronica Mars, too. According to CNN, our favorite high school sleuth is probably safe.

... the picture at the Post shows that it'll be called the CW. How totally original.

Anticorruption platform

Some congressional Democrats are busy growing a pair or two:

A prime target for changes are the closed-door negotiations known as conference committees, where members of the House and Senate hash out their differences over competing versions of legislation. House and Senate Democrats last week proposed that all such conference committees meet in the open and that any changes be made by a vote of all conferees.

The doors are only closed to the public, not to lobbyists' influence. Whatever we get out of this corruption scandal, I hope it's something as good as ending the abuse of conference committees and late-night votes. This can only happen now, before Democrats have too much power to want to give any up.

Constitutionalish

Via Atrios, a fun interview with the head of the NSA:

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the --

GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable --

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --

GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe -- and I'd like you to respond to this -- is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

Huh. Well, I had to check that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,

So General Hayden is doing pretty well so far. But then there's that pesky comma, followed by:

and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Hmm. If that's the part of the constitution the NSA is most familiar with...

Post can't handle teh internets

Seems that after the blogosphere reacted to Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell's Abramoff misrepresentations, the Post has turned off comments on their blog to prevent a flow of obscenities and personal attacks. Jim Brady's response sounds a wee bit prudish, if you ask me:

Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

Teh internets are simply not the place for "civil conversation" - looking at bloggers as a kind of culture, it's pretty clear that there is no shared taboo against profanity and attack, and a general aversion to censorship means that the Post's actions likely exacerbated bloggers' frustration, thus increasing the frequency and tenacity of the offending comments. And then there are all the trolls, who should by now be a known hazard of allowing comments on websites of any type.

Anyway, some good commentary over at Crooks and Liars, which includes:

She didn't deliver the truth, Jim! That's a lot different than what we want to hear. If Howell responded quickly and made a change to her initially "faulty" reporting this would have been averted, but she and the Post stuck their heads in the sand and attacked the messengers. It's a fairly typical Rovian tactic. We have to scream and yell to get anyone to start taking a look at problems, then are labeled as trolls.

Branching pics

How I was convinced to leave my dorm room at 5:40 a.m. this morning I'll never quite understand, but it did mean I got to see some way-too-excited-for-the-early-morning cadets get their new branch insignias pinned onto them:

Impliedly dictatorial

The Post is running another article relating the Bush administration's justification for invading our privacy. A gem of constitutional-ish psuedo-scholarliness

Steven G. Bradbury, acting assistant attorney general for the department's Office of Legal Counsel ... said the president has a special role -- and duty -- to take whatever military action is needed to counter attacks on the United States, and those actions necessarily include intercepting telecommunications and e-mail.

I for one very much doubt that the Framers' interpretation of "military action" would include the unwarranted interception of citizens' personal communication. As for the president's "special role," being commander in chief hardly entitles him to take extralegal action any more than would be allowed of other military commanders. I hope that those arguing that Bush hasn't overstepped here wouldn't grant our generals unchecked, super-legal power to disregard our laws (indeed, British generals acting thusly are a big reason we have a Bill of Rights). Furthermore, the explicit enumeration of powers in the constitution seems to point to Congress as the source of decision-making authority for legal issues in war:

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Whew! That's a lot of stuff Congress gets to decide. Let's see the sum total of enumerated presidential authority regarding the military:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States;

Hmm. Yep, that's definitely the branch charged with doing whatever the fuck he wants during undeclared wartime. Or not.

So if Congress does have some authority in these matters, what do they say? According to Alberto Gonzalez,

the president's power to protect the country with surveillance was reaffirmed when Congress passed a resolution in October 2001 that authorized the president to use military force against al Qaeda and to deter future terrorist attacks.

That's great, except it's not what Congress actually said. From Sen. Joe Biden:

In extending this broad authority to cover those ‘planning, authorizing, committing, or aiding the attacks’ it should go without saying, however, that the resolution is directed only at using force abroad to combat acts of international terrorism. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

And it's been said a lot, but I'll reiterate: we have a secret court that can issue secret warrants for this kind of communication, even after the information has been secretly collected. Is Bush worried that these secret magistrates might in fact be (secretly) terrorist spies, that they would reveal our secret methods to our enemies? Cause they haven't exactly been an impediment to the administration's requests of warrants thus far (via Josh Marshall).

More on the scary stuff

Xeni over at BoingBoing has some excellent coverage of the whole Google subpoena thing. Seems they have more guts than AOL, Yahoo and MSN, who all caved.

Kaine in 2012?

The new Virginia Governor has been tapped to give the Democratic rebuttal to the State of the Union. Is this just the party showing its more conservative-friendly side before the midterm elections, or possible preparation for a future presidential candidacy?

Old but interesting

This electoral map of the Washington area shows some interesting trends:

More scary, pointless stuff

When the Bush administration runs out of 9/11 justifications, I guess it always has the children as an option:

The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Hmm. Yes, that makes sense to me - we need to make porn illegal, so let's get records of people legally viewing porn. Actually, the law wouldn't make adult content illegal, it'd just require that adults

use access codes or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, and it would have punished violators with fines up to $50,000 or jail time.

Aside from more outsourcing of porn to foreign shores, I'm not sure what effect this would have. That is, unless the anti-pornographers want to hold US search engines that unwittingly deliver porn to the same standard - as sure a way of promoting Quaero as I can think of. No, the best way to keep your kids from consuming massive amounts of brain-rotting internet porn is actually not big-government intervention (these guys are still Republicans?) but actually plain-old parental supervision.

About that registration thingie - I'm sure most adults lie a lot in whatever information they give to porn sites, given the immense social stigma against visiting them (especially all the fetish ones). Given that this is the case, how in god's name do we expect to prevent kids from lying in the same ways?

Also, who uses their browser for porn? Don't we all have some P2P client by now?

The slow path to security

GW is finally implementing an identification system not using social security numbers. About damn time if you ask me. This quote from the Hatchet underscores the move's importance:

Residents of D.C., have experienced more incidents of consumer fraud than any other U.S. city's residents, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 are at the highest risk, according to reports from the Federal Trade Commission.

Lets not forget that the university has not been very careful with our information in the past...

Quagmire on tape

I saw most of GNN's BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge on Showtime yesterday. It's a fascinating documentary about the complexity of the Iraq occupation, and does what I feel is a fairly good job showing the differing assumptions and access to information of the parties involved, and includes perspectives of a US Army officer, a post-Desert Storm anti-Saddam rebel and exile, a nonprofit worker, and a woman sympathizing with the insurgents. It struck me how both the Army and insurgent voices were woefully ignorant of each other's motives and experience. It's striking, really, that the fundamental problem appears to be a lack of communication and trust.

Id love to see an update, as a lot has changed since it was shot in late 2003. If you've got access to Showtime or the DVD, I'd suggest watching BattleGround as soon as you can.

Brush with disaster

GreenCorps called me Tuesday - dodging that bullet as we speak.

iTunes and college

I think Apple has done a far better job than its competitors in getting college students to use its jukebox, and not just through the iPod (which admittedly plays a huge part in its success). iTunes music sharing is really much more useful to the college student on the campus network than to the average home user, and provides a nice legal alternative to the Napster 1.0 heirs.

Now, Standford iTunes, which organizes lecture podcasts within the iTunes Music Store, represents the next killer ap for the iTunes media platform, and Apple's apparent support for future implementation at other schools bodes well for its continued dominance. And it'll benefit students and other learners to boot.

Clinton running?

Naw...

Also, a place "that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument" = plantation? sure it doesn't = the DLC? Those centrist free marketeers aren't too keen on Democrats not with their program, as I recall.

Ann's coming

And she's robbing the CRs blind. Seriously, who would pay the Coulter bot $15,000 just to come and act all crazy? Maybe she'll introduce another one of her fine witticisms while on campus.

Can't really figure out why Kos is quoted in the Hatchet article, though. He's related to this how?

One more thing that puzzles me a bit - how does someone as fringy as Coulter get published regularly, while calling for the deaths of her political opponents, when there is no analog on the left for her insanity? Is she the Tyler Hahn satire performance artist of the grown-up world, or is she actually serious?

Bush's would-be torturers are wimps

Jim Henley makes the excellent point that in the so-called ticking time bomb scenario, it's unlikely that an interrogator wouldn't resort to whatever means she felt necessary to elicit necessary information, regardless of legal consequences for doing so. And as the Editors quote:

Don’t talk to me about the suffering you’d bravely inflict on someone else.

Glad I'm not in high school

Seems some DC area schools are worried about their students' use of the big, scary internets. Their reaction? Ban Facebook, of course!

The Post article quotes some sort of security consultant about the dangers of blogging and Facebook. I have no way of knowing whether his allegations that Facebook causes child molestation are true, but I suspect he doesn't, either. I'll accept the notion that predators might find a way on to the high school site, with fake identities and such, but I've heard of no instances of this to back up that theory. I find the other fears, that colleges and employers might reject students base on Facebook profiles, more far-fetched. How will they get access? Would they really spend the necessary time to snoop on each applicant's online activity?

I think the invasion of these students' privacy and the interference with their right to communicate is a pretty poor choice for these schools to make. It would be nice to respect kids rights once in a while.

Facebook adds pulse

OK, so they did this last month, but I missed it and it's kinda cool. Facebook now shows what's popular at your school, and allows you to compare that to any other school or Facebook overall. It's called Pulse. The unfortunate thing is seeing what sort of plebeian things tend to be most beloved by the general Facebook populace (and, seeing that your eclectic interests aren't so unique after all).

MLK pictures

Went to the Lincoln Memorial today in honor of Dr. King. Surprised to see so few flowers there:

Maryland passes Wal-Mart bill

Just a quick note, looks like Maryland will force Wal-Mart to provide better health care to its workers there. This is good news, and fits with the state's general mindset of long-term planning. From the Post:

"We don't want to kill this giant. We want this giant to behave itself," said Del. Anne Healey (D-Prince George's County), the lead sponsor in the House. "We want this giant not to be a bully."

'06 election cycle shaping up

The Fix over at the Washington Post lists America Votes as potentially one of the biggest players in the 2006 elections. As a former volunteer, I hope this isn't the case, or that they've seriously learned from their previous mistakes.

America Votes was one of the lead failures in the 2004 Ohio debacle, spending who know how much on well-intended but pointless bussing of volunteers from safe states to battlegrounds like Ohio. In a feat of shear idiocy, these volunteers were sent door to door to attempt to convince strangers thought to be Democrats to get out and vote, with only a weekend for canvassers to work a neighborhood. It was the kind of beltway or east-coast plan that could never succeed, especially when pitted against the more organic Republican turnout plan that made use of residents who voters would know as neighbors. For a party of the people, we sucked at grassroots in '04.

Geek break

Apple released a bunch of nice stuff on Tuesday, the (awkwardly named) MacBook Pro providing me with a nice upgrade path from my venerable TiBook. The 6-month-early switch to Intel was a pleasant surprise. Good going, Apple.

An unpleasant surprise comes from an iTunes update, which introduces spyware-like behavior as an optional but default feature. The added mini-store subwindow provides users with song suggestions based on their clicks within their music libraries. Here's a screen shot:



The song suggestion thing involves iTunes contacting Apple with information about the song and the user. An Apple source claims that the information is discarded. But intrepid investigators quoted at BoingBoing have found that the packets sent to Apple contain users' Apple IDs, the permanent customer codes used to track all interactions with Apple, which are tied to such information as name, address and credit card number. It bothers me that Apple, which now has rather close dealings with the lawsuit-happy music and movie industries, might know what I'm listening to, without having told me this. If Apple's really promising to neither keep nor share such information, I want that promise in writing.

Alito, diversion

As Atrios says, it matters. However, press attention for the Alito hearings have pushed the relevant misdeeds of the president and congress from the front page of all major news websites.

Also, the focus on abortion rights, an issue on which everyone pretty much knows where Alito stands, has sidelined deeper concerns about Alito's opinions on privacy and presidential powers, which are probably more salient right now. Abortion can't be sold to the Senate Republicans as a reason to reject Alito, but his pro-executive leanings should give them pause, if that argument were well articulated. It isn't, though.

Don't mess with geeks

They will destroy you.

Pat

From CNN:

Television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which Robertson opposed.

"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.

Gotta love that biblicalish syntax there, and how it slips into cowboy-ese.

One has to wonder, though - why hasn't god assassinated Hugo Chavez yet?

...more:

Robertson spokeswoman Angell Watts said of people who criticized the comments: "What they're basically saying is, 'How dare Pat Robertson quote the Bible?'"

"This is what the word of God says," Watts told the AP. "This is nothing new to the Christian community."

I guess I missed that part where god mentions the EU and the UN.

Technical problems

The links are all screwy for some reason - and it seems to be systematically messed. I'll investigate soon, but for now the issue should be resolvable by making the sensible edit to the url once you get the 404 page (you'll see what I mean). Any suggestions as to how I could have screwed this up are welcome.

... Ah. Never use MS Word to write blogger posts, apparently. I'll fix everything later.

... And it's fixed. Stupid non-standard quotation marks.

Directory help

Since blogging is being done in escrow this week due to lack of internet access in the Justice Center, a list of today’s posts in non-reverse chronological order:

Jury duty blogging
Geek break
Nixon/Cheney ‘04
Best line I’ve read today
Hey – I thought of that first!
Alito prospects

Alito prospects

After laying out some of the problems facing Alito’s confirmation, Kos asks:

Will Republicans in the Senate go along with a judge who seeks to undermine the legislative branch, and hence their own power?

I think that the administration may have a few tricks up its sleeve to make Alito happen. I wonder especially how much control the administration has over the justice department, and whether the Abramoff scandal will be held out as a huge stick to threaten senators with should they defect from the party line (by which I mean the president’s decree). I can see this being played by Rove, as the scandal can likely be concluded to the satisfaction of the press without netting everyone involved, allowing certain senators to save their careers by sacrificing our democracy.

Hey – I thought of that first!

Retrievr looks pretty cool, and eerily similar to my own thoughts. Now someone just needs to make the hum-a-tune music search. I’m sure I’ll read about it on BoingBoing, too.

Best line I’ve read today

From The Editors, of course:

I don’t know what libertarians do when telemarketers call - engage them in reasoned debate over the relative merits of lower “anytime” rates versus free nights and weekends, I gather - but I fucking hang up on them.

The post from which that was born, about pundits-for-hire, is worth the read.

Nixon/Cheney ‘04

Looks like Bush may not be so much a Reaganaut as a Nixonian democrat. From Americablog, via The Poor Man:

NBC has acknowledged that they have information to suggest that Bush may have spied (be spying) on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and that NBC is currently investigating that very possibility. This isn’t just conjecture anymore, NBC has confirmed it.
You can read about how NBC changed the transcript of the interview after we reported on it here.
And you can read how spying on CNN’s Amanpour could end up involving Bill Clinton, John Kerry and General Wesley Clark here.

I had to change my pants after reading that.

It’s dangerous to hope that this is true, of course, for at least two reasons –

(1) Those of us who believe the president is a tyrant or trying to become one are likely to be biased by that assumption, to the point of believing things we probably shouldn’t. This is bound to make us look rather silly if the truth turns out to be different.

(2) We’re probably fucked if this is true, because it means Bush actually is a tyrant. And if that’s the case, we probably don’t have a Congress with sufficient cojones or sense of national civic duty to depose their partisan leader. And anyway, we won’t know soon enough, as the Alito hearings next week will probably not get stalled, and we’ll have that ideological, executive-enabling asshat on the court, who’ll give Bush all the power he asks for.

Disbelief is even more dangerous, of course. We need to suck it up and get to work on vetting this story, and then be prepared to take necessary steps to impeach the president if this is true. And we’d better be ready to get harassed, assaulted, arrested, or disappeared if it is.

Geek break

Boing Boing has a post about claims that the best way to advertise to teens is in-game. Makes sense to me – I spend a lot more time playing SimCity than watching TV. I’m down with a game selling space within it to advertisers, as long as that decreases my cost to play. I’m not prepared to pay full price for an ad-laden game just to line the pocket of the game company, though.

Jury duty blogging

I can’t say anything about any cases I’ve been working on this week, largely because I haven’t worked on one yet. Even if I do, though, I won’t say anything – so quit expecting juicy legal gossip.

What I will write about is the general experience of sitting around in the jury pool – now on my third day. Because of the holiday, we got started on Tuesday this week, meaning our usual 5-day service mandated of Cuyahoga county jurors is shortened to 4. Good in some ways I suppose, though I could use the extra $25 we get per day, and I’d rather have a greater chance of serving on a case.

Tuesday morning was hell – a combination of our 8 a.m. check-in time at the Justice Center and the less-than-convenient public transit system (the most frequently the Rapid runs is every 10 minutes) meant I had to be up at 6:20, which was a big adjustment from my usual winter break wakeup time of noon. Turns out I didn’t have to race to the courthouse, though, as there was a huge line to check in when I arrived. I don’t know whether it was the influence of crime dramas or what, but I was not expecting that many jurors – seems like at least 200 here. Makes sense, though, now that I know more. During our instructional briefing, we were told that the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas is the most trafficked court in the state, with jurisdiction over 25 percent of the statewide caseload, and 40 courtrooms. Even with 90-some percent of cases settled out of court, that still translates into a huge need for jurors.

Case in point – yesterday, after much anticipation (and as soon as I broke out the computer game), I was finally called as a prospective juror. Our gaggle of pin-wearing maybe-wannabe-jurors made our way over to the Lakeside Courthouse, only to sit around for an hour or so. After several chapters of The Brothers Karamazov, the bailiff returned to explain the delay – the parties had reached a settlement. Seems that the presence of a jury acts as a kind of deterrent, and lawyers playing chicken like to skirt the possibility of trial in order to get a better deal for their side. Interesting stuff.

Other observations:

This whole process is steeped in nationalistic language, as we’ve been thanked many times for doing our duty to our country, and there’s been a lot said about how the jury system, often described as “time-tested,” is part of the foundation of our freedom, and is “the envy of the world.” I guess there probably are a number of non-Americans who envy our access to trial by jury, though many of them probably live at Guantanimo Bay right now.

The Jury assembly area is nicely appointed, with board games, couches, magazines, a quiet room and computer desks (any guess where I spend most of my time?). We’re afforded more freedom than I expected, with trips to the cafeteria or a smoking area permitted as long as we’re fast about it.

Most people seem in pretty good spirits, and the club of business-types who hang out in the computer corner seem content to get their work done via cell phone (and rather loudly so, I might add). Everyone is in that rather-talkative and friendly state that Americans seem to get in when thrown together in unusual circumstances.

The crowd is younger than I’d have guessed, probably because many students are in the same position in which I find myself, of having delayed jury duty until their breaks. Good thing to know if your case would be impacted especially by the opinions of college students.

I suspect the whole thing is a diabolical plot to enrich the downtown economy – hundreds of jurors, many of whom would not ordinarily visit during the week, are forced by law to come down here, and they’re given a lunch break long enough to exit the building. I bet local eateries make a lot more than they would otherwise.

Get out the buckets!

Heads will be a-rollin' now that Abramoff has apparently been flipped. Is it bad that I was giddy when I heard on NPR that he'd plead guilty?

Hopefully we can use this to free up some republican seats - a retirement or six could have a huge impact on Democrats' chances of picking up some congressional power, since the GOP has so far been pretty good at containing its potential quitters and climbers.