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[permanent link] (2 zephyrs | shoot the breeze)

Yes, I cheered for a moment at the deaths of so many infidels... until I remembered how much business we do in New York! My country has a huge per capita income, but it's honestly not the most solid in the world. Implications of us involved in terrorism could knock us over the edge, and, if you took a poll of our citizens, you'd see a near majority consider economic stability more important than mass murder. As much as I want you all to die, we have our own housing bubble to worry about over here. Do any of you understand that? Sometimes I think I'd have to use a pipe bomb to get through your thick skulls.

And honestly, how many of you knew your ports weren't owned by Americans before all this? I swear, if any of you raise your hands, I'll cut them off. None of you knew anything about the ports until the talking heads and harlots jumped on this issue, and suddenly all of you are like, "Oh no! The Arabs are going to run our ports and they want to kill us all!" Hell yes, we want to kill you all, but it's not like we could fit that in our business plan. Have any of you looked at our business plan? Of course not. Holy Allah, I so want to strangle you all!

All I want you stupid infidels to understand is that this deal is all business. All thing being equal, I would stab you all repeatedly and then behead you, but that is not a money making venture.

At least one of the ports where DP World is set to operate, Baltimore, has been dogged by security shortcomings for years. A Baltimore Sun investigation in June 2005 revealed that the port's fiber-optic alarm system on the perimeter fence malfunctioned and was usually switched off, and that port police were so understaffed that their patrol boats often dry-docked because there was no one to operate them. The newspaper also found that a pair of "video cameras" guarding the entrance to one important marine terminal were actually blocks of wood on poles.

Last summer, a tour of the port, the nation's eighth largest, revealed gaps in perimeter fences, unattended gates, surveillances systems that didn't work and insufficient police patrols on land and sea.

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[permanent link] (2 zephyrs | shoot the breeze)

The planned execution of convicted rapist and murderer Michael Morales has been halted after two court-appointed doctors refused to participate, the BBC reports.

The anaesthesiologists were scheduled to be present at the termination at the behest of a US federal judge who agreed with defence arguments that the cocktail of lethal chemicals used might cause extreme pain if the initial dose of barbiturates proved inadequate. Accordingly, the judge ordered two doctors to attend and intervene, "in the event that Morales woke up or appeared to be in pain".

However, the two doctors declared any such intervention "medically unethical", adding: "As a result, we have withdrawn from participation in this current process... What is being asked of us is ethically unacceptable."

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America rejects the false comfort of isolationism. We are the nation that saved liberty in Europe, and liberated death camps, and helped raise up democracies, and faced down an evil empire. Once again, we accept the call of history to deliver the oppressed and move this world toward peace. We remain on the offensive against terror networks. We have killed or captured many of their leaders -- and for the others, their day will come.

The same is true of Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people. The regime in that country sponsors terrorists in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon -- and that must come to an end. (Applause.) The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.

So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.)

We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. (Applause.)

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.) By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)

if substitution is not in place by 2025 there will be so much
pressure of m.e oil they won't be able to supply even 25% if they
wished to...
he's still misleading america....

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To rein in wasteful spending, Dr. Coburn intends to offer an amendment on every pork project stuffed into appropriations bills this year. There were at least 13,998 earmarked projects contained in last year’s appropriations bills. By way of comparison, the Senate had only 366 roll call votes last year. Needless to say we are beefing up our appropriations staff for this challenge and we have requested that we be given at least 72 hours to review appropriations bills before they are considered.

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The four women who successfully defended themselves against charges after they walked through downtown Moravia topless in August have sent notice that they intend to sue municipalities involved in their case. [...]

The district attorney's office - facing a 1992 state Court of Appeals ruling that said women can remove their tops in public places where men can as long as it's not for commercial purposes - sought to prove the women negatively affected commerce in Moravia by going topless. But it eventually determined it did not have enough evidence to sustain the charges.

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If you want to meet the future political leaders of the United States, go to Iraq. I am not referring to the generals, or even the colonels. I mean the junior officers and enlistees in their 20s and 30s. In the decades ahead, they will represent something uncommon in U.S. military history: war veterans with practical experience in democratic governance, learned under the most challenging of conditions. For several weeks, I observed these young officers working behind the scenes to organize the election in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. ... Throughout Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become veritable mayors of micro-regions, meeting with local sheiks, setting up waste-removal programs to employ young men, dealing with complaints about cuts in electricity and so on. They have learned to arbitrate tribal politics, to speak articulately and to sit through endless speeches without losing patience.

I watched Lt. John Turner of Indianapolis get up on his knees from a carpet while sipping tea with a former neighborhood mukhtar and plead softly: "Sir, I am willing to die for a country that is not my own. So will you resume your position as mukhtar? Brave men must stand forward. Iraq's wealth is not oil but its civilization. Trust me by the projects I bring, not by my words." Turner, a D student in high school, got straightened out as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard before earning a degree from Purdue and becoming an Army officer. He is one of what Col. Michael Shields, commander of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Mosul, calls his "young soldier-statesmen."

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Historically, there has been a higher perceived and practical need for government in big cities. Sewer systems, for example, are a matter of life and death in cities where diseases spread rapidly through densely packed populations. In the country, outhouses worked fine for most people until septic tanks with indoor plumbing came along, and neither needed government involvement or assistance to install and use -- except in so far as they might require permission from local regulators, who were therefore resented.

Clean and healthful running water in cities likewise entailed major public works programs as well as taxation in some form. Water in the country was usually a matter of drilling a well and was therefore untaxed. Garbage disposal in cities, required to prevent all sort of unpleasantness including vermin infestation and disease, has almost always involved government. In the country, you could burn or bury.

Crime rates, despite Hollywood's slander of the American West, have also traditionally been a more serious problem in big cities. When you can see people coming from far away and tend to know all those around you, those already accustomed to handling weapons and hunting have a different take on crime prevention than those who live among high-density strangers.

The economics of the newspaper business is far more favorable to cities than to the countryside. The cost of news content production in cities, where populations are easily accessible, is much lower than it is in the countryside -- especially before the era of cheap and reliable telephones. Moreover, the cost of product distribution was dramatically less expensive in urban areas where paper boys often travel only yards, as opposed to miles in rural areas, to deliver a single, incremental newspaper.

As a result, big city newspapers thrived and the biggest city's newspaper, the New York Times, thrived most. That the journalists and editors who worked in the big city news business reflected the local political culture is not surprising. The sentiment that city folk are just a little bit smarter than country folk, or some equivalent chauvinism related to locational and team psychology, is not a conspiracy and probably couldn't have been prevented any more than you could get the majority of Green Bay Packers fans to root for New York, or vice versa.

“[...] for every journalist who contributed to George W. Bush’s campaign, another 93 contributed to Kerry’s campaign.”

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"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause."

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has not been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

What about consciousness? You’d expect God to be conscious as we understand it, right? But that wouldn’t make sense for an omnipotent being. Our own consciousness is mostly about imagining what can happen next and comparing it to what does so we can adjust accordingly. That’s useful for survival, but only for slow procreating creatures that are made of meat and surrounded by carnivores. God wouldn’t need that sort of imagination because omnipotence means your preferences are the same as reality. There’s no point in being almighty if you have to sit around imagining what you want and then waiting for it. So God would have no use for consciousness.

It appears that the judge in the Dover case has ruled rather broadly and this bodes ill for ID in general. This in turn, in my view, bodes ill for creationists of all stripes. The problem for creationists in general is that ID represents one of the last stages of evolution of creationist “theory” before it goes extinct. ID is creationism with all the references to God removed and tarted up in sophisticated language of mathematics and biology to make it look more like science than any previous incarnation of creationism.

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Since going alone is not a financial option, Britain would look elsewhere for defense development cooperation - to European industry, and to EU-led programs to create both a common European defense industry and a European force independent of NATO or the USA. A British military that is more and more interoperable with its European partners, and less and less common with the USA, and also not fostering ties at the weapons program level because cooperation is curtailed... is a Britain that will find itself, slowly but surely pulled away from its special defense relationship with the USA. This will, of course, have ripple effects on its foreign policy. Especially given that broken promises and a breakdown of cooperation would be what led to this whole situation in the first place.

At the same time, the plane's dependence on software makes protecting the security of that source code an absolute must. To have even parts of it fall into hostile hands could be a disaster of the first magnitude. On the American side, there is also the quasi-protectionist angle of not wishing to have others copy the software and develop spin-off products in future that are based on US work. Even attempting to scrutinize that would be a challenge, however, creating intrusiveness, approval, and friction problems of its own. The option of American code control as the sole "clearinghouse" for the program is thus an attractive one.

On the other hand, with $2 billion invested as a "Tier One" partner, Britain may justly feel that a full partner should not have to go hat in hand to the USA every time a change is required. [...]

Britain, as the USA's closest defense partner, would like to have the ITAR restrictions waived in many cases, essentially conferring automatic approval on British requests. In 2000, Bill Clinton promised both Britain and Australia (another genuine ally who cooperates on a number of defense projects with the USA) that he would work to make this happen. George W. Bush and his administration have also worked to make this happen. Both Bill and W. have failed, however, largely owing to resistance from a few powerful congressional Republicans - esp. House International Relations Committee Chair Henry Hyde [R-IL], and House Armed Services Chair Duncan Hunter [R-CA].

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Mr. President, because I was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001, I want to be very clear from the start. I am not opposed to reauthorization of the Patriot Act. I supported the bipartisan, compromise reauthorization bill that the Senate passed earlier this year without a single Senator objecting. I believe that bill should become law. The Senate reauthorization bill is not a perfect bill, but it is a good bill. If that were the bill we were considering today, I would be here on the floor speaking in support of it. In fact, we could have reauthorized the Patriot Act months ago if the House had taken up the bill that the Senate approved without any objections.

I also want to respond to those who argue that people who are demanding a better conference report want to let the Patriot Act expire. That is nonsense. Not a single member of this body is calling for any provision of the Patriot Act to expire. As Senator Sununu eloquently argued yesterday, just because we are coming up against the end of the year does not mean we should have to compromise the rights of law-abiding Americans. There are any number of ways that we can get this done and get it done right before the end of the year.

Let me also be clear about how we ended up voting on a badly flawed conference report just days before certain provisions of the Patriot Act expire. The only reason that we are debating this conference report in the middle of December, rather than the middle of September or October, is because the House refused to appoint its conferees for three and a half months. It passed its reauthorization bill on July 21, but didn’t appoint conferees until November 9. In the Senate, on the other hand, we passed a bill by unanimous consent on July 29 and appointed conferees the very same day. We were ready and willing to start the process of resolving our differences with the House right away, leaving plenty of time to get this done without the pressure of the end of the year deadline.

Section 215 is at the center of this debate over the Patriot Act. It is also one of the provisions that I tried unsuccessfully to amend here on this floor in October 2001. So it makes sense to start my discussion of the specific problems I have with the conference report with the infamous “library” provision.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to obtain secret court orders in domestic intelligence investigations to get all kinds of business records about people, including not just library records, but also medical records and various other types of business records. The Patriot Act allowed the government to obtain these records as long as they were "sought for" a terrorism investigation. That’s a very low standard. It didn’t require that the records concern someone who was suspected of being a terrorist or spy, or even suspected of being connected to a terrorist or spy. It didn’t require any demonstration of how the records would be useful in the investigation. Under Section 215, if the government simply said it wanted records for a terrorism investigation the secret FISA court was required to issue the order -- period. To make matters worse, recipients of these orders are also subject to an automatic gag order. They cannot tell anyone that they have been asked for records.

Now some in the Administration, and even in this body, took the position that people shouldn’t be able to criticize these provisions until they could come up with a specific example of “abuse.” The Attorney General makes that same argument today in an op-ed in the Washington Post when he dismisses concerns about the Patriot Act by saying that “[t]here have been no verified civil liberties abuses in the four years of the act's existence.” That has always struck me as a strange argument since 215 orders are issued by a secret court and people who receive them are prohibited by law from discussing them. In other words, the law is designed so that it’s almost impossible to know if abuses have occurred. [...]

The Senate bill also would give recipients of a 215 order an explicit, meaningful right to challenge business record orders and the accompanying gag orders in court. These provisions passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously after tough negotiations late into the night.

The conference report did away with this delicate compromise.

The 52-47 roll call by which the Senate voted to reject reauthorization of several provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Sixty votes were needed to overcome a filibuster of the bill.

For those of us who think of the Patriot Act as actual legislation rather than a symbol of the Bush Administration, this is rather puzzling stuff. The dirty little secret about the Patriot Act is that only about 3% of the Act is controversial, and only about a third of that 3% is going to expire on December 31st. Further, much of the reauthorization actually puts new limits on a number of the controversial non-sunsetting provisions, and some of the sunsetting provisions increased privacy protections. As a result, it's not immediately obvious to me whether we'll have greater civil liberties on January 1, 2006 if the Patriot Act is reauthorized or if it is allowed to expire. (To be fair, though, I'd have to run through the effect of every expiring section and all of the reauthorization language to check this - maybe I would feel differently if I did.)

A single-subject, descriptive-title (hereinafter, SSDT) requirement for all Congressional bills — more popularly labeled a truth-in-legislation amendment as suggested by law professor Brannon Denning and attorney Brooks Smith (see their “Uneasy Riders: The Case for a Truth-in-Legislation Amendment,” 1999 Utah Law Review 858) — would only help cure some of the legislative abuses inflicted upon the populace by both chambers of Congress. The Denning/Smith version would read: "Congress shall pass no bill, and no bill shall become law, which embraces more than one subject, that subject being clearly expressed in the title."

In a 279-109 vote, the GOP-controlled House approved a resolution saying the chamber is committed "to achieving victory in Iraq" and that setting an "artificial timetable" would be "fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory." [...]

It says that "setting an artificial timetable for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq, or immediately terminating their deployment in Iraq and redeploying them elsewhere in the region, is fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory in Iraq." [...]

By putting the resolution to a vote, Republican leaders forced Democrats to make a choice: either break ranks with their party and support the GOP resolution, or oppose it and open themselves to criticism, ahead of a congressional election year in which Iraq will be a focus, that they had rejected the notion of victory in Iraq.

McCain has also been tacking rightward in less obvious—or at least less aggressively publicized—ways. He has thrown his support behind the teaching of “intelligent design” along with evolution in public schools. He has endorsed a constitutional amendment in Arizona to ban gay marriage and deny benefits to unmarried couples of any kind. He has met privately with Jerry Falwell, in an apparent attempt to gin up a rapprochement with the Christian right, which he famously and vividly attacked at the height of the 2000 campaign.

[permanent link] (shoot the breeze)

The Inner Prop and I served in Operation Enduring Freedom V (Afghanistan, March 2004-March 2005). We stood at the end of the longest sustained supply line in the history of human conflict. We were in war-torn Central Asia. Af-frickin'-ghanistan. We had decent food, e-mail, phone (OK, sometimes they weren't always working, but almost all the time) excellent medical support, good pay, regular (if slow) mail. We had a PXs at most of the larger bases, and coffee places sprang up too. We had so damned much ammunition that we needed to build a bigger ammunition supply point at Bagram, AF. We had so many vehicles that we were constantly squabbling over where to put them all - and we had enough up-armored ones too. Our supply warehouses were stuffed with clothing, boots, body armor and the like.

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Democrat colleague, Rep. Jack Murtha, whose carefully nuanced position on Iraq is: We're all doomed unless we pull out by next Tuesday! (I quote from memory.) [...]

It's just about acceptable in polite society to disagree with Murtha, but only if you do it after a big 20-minute tongue bath about what "a fine man" he is (as Rumsfeld said) or what "a good man" he is (as Cheney called him) or what "a fine man, a good man" he is (as Bush phrased it). [...]

There's an economic boom in the Shia south and a tourist boom in the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers,

Amount of cash MoveOn.org spent to hire actors for the commercial: $20,000

Amount of cash MoveOn.org spent to purchase the b-roll film of UK soldiers which they called US soldiers: 5,000 pounds (see here).

Amount MoveOn.org allegedly spent in Georgia's first district on a media buy: $480,000 (see here).

And the results...

ZERO calls, emails, or letters resulting from the ad: PRICELESS

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The writer of this remembers a remark made to him by Mr. Jefferson concerning the English Newspapers which at that time, 1787, while Mr. Jefferson was Minister at Paris, were most vulgarly abusive. The remark applies with equal force to the Federal papers of America. The remark was, that "the licentiousness of the press produces the same effect as the restraint of the press was intended to do. The restraint, said he, was to prevent things being told, and the licentiousness of the press prevents things being believed when they are told." We have in this state an evidence of the truth of this remark. The number of federal papers in the city and state of New-York are more than five to one to the number of republican papers, yet the majority of the elections go always against the federal papers, which is demonstrative evidence that the licentiousness of those papers are destitute of credit.

The life of an [Red] Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand, it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated, two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other part more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is, that man, in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over, to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the earth is cultivated. When therefore a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, arts, and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because, without it, there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing therefore now to be done, is, to remedy the evils, and preserve the benefits, that have arisen to society, by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state.

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Every so often in our nation's history we adopt a policy of strict isolationism due to our fear and ignorance.

It is once again time for such fear and ignorance.

It's time to admit the obvious: the rest of the world hates us. So, let's hate them back. Really, what's worth all this grief we get from dealing with them? Apparently they all enjoy fascism and murder and what not, so leave them to it. [...]

But what if terrorists attack again because their god Llama told them too? Then we start nuking places at random (cruise missiles are preferred as we can use those from the comfort of our own home). Our new policy will be that we no longer distinguish between foreigners, so, if we are attacked, it is the fault of all non-Americans. Other countries will soon learn that America is extremely violent when preturbed, and soon they'll be tripping over each other to make sure that no one ever bothers us.

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The Senate did accept three Coburn amendments. One amendment required that all earmarks be included in the bill’s conference report. This amendment helps lift the veil of secrecy that conceals the process of inserting special projects into appropriations bills. Similar amendments have been attached to the Agriculture, Military Construction and Department of Defense Appropriations bills.

The Coburn amendment would have blocked funding for a $223 million bridge to a town in Alaska with a population of 50 people. At $4.46 million per person, the cost of the bridge alone would be enough to buy every island resident their own personal Lear jet. The Coburn amendment also would have blocked funding for a $229 million bridge that would connect Anchorage, Alaska to hundreds of square miles of unpopulated wetlands.

How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions.

Pork is the poster child for government bloat, and it needs to highlighted, project by project, by project, and the politicians who push it should be made to defend each project again and again.

when the American people want things to change, they will change.

Just after I read your blog on the Coburn Amendments' failure, I received a phone call - AT MY OFFICE (a church) - from the Republican National Committee thanking me for my past support and asking for more money for some critical election in Florida.

I interrupted them and said "You won't get one thin dime from me, until you do something about the pork. I called my Republican Senator's (Coleman) office a couple weeks ago to talk about Pork - but barely received a response. Now they rejected the Coburn amendment. Where is the fiscally responsible Republican party I helped to elect? You won't get any more money from me until it changes."

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