North Texas Nonconformist

An article from Jay Rosen about the terrible state of the Sunday current affairs shows and what could be done to fix them. Of course, as he himself admits on Twitter, it will most likely never happen...

The most recent attempt by a disturbed passenger to blow up a US commercial flight in the air, has, sadly but predictably, not led to any visionary or useful answer from the Federal Government branches responsible for air safety.
Instead, as Ed Brayton explains, the TSA and DHS are instead introducing yet more unbelievably stupid rules:

...several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

The rules are nothing more than a dumb-ass response to a single incident, and are symptomatic of what happens when officials disconnected from air travel and non-government reality are allowed to write regulations without proper oversight and submission to tough questions from elected representatives and the media.
Brayton hits two nails on the head:

TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.
If you're really cynical, you could make a good argument that they're really only interested in the appearance of safety. They've simply concluded that the more difficult they make your flight, the safer you'll feel. Never mind if any of the theatrics actually work.
On top of all of that, it's becoming more and more clear that this guy should never have been allowed on a plane in the first place. The government had been warned specifically about him by his father three months ago, who went to the US embassy and told them that he had gotten involved with jihadi groups in Yemen. We have a no fly list full of people who aren't terrorists, how did this guy not get on that list?

I want to see TSA and DHS officials brought in front of intelligent media (which means that if they invite the major networks means a largely empty room) and elected representatives and forced to defend this stupid response, and they should be informed that any answer along the lines of "cannot comment - national security" will result in ridicule and laughter from the interlocutors.
We need sensible, properly thought-through responses to security issues, not this moronic knee-jerk nonsense.
UPDATE - As Wendell Berry points out on Scholars and Rogues, this is the underlying cause of the mess we are currently in concerning airport and flight security:

What i don’t understand is the idea that Americans are entitled to perfect security. Here we are (and for the record, all the troops stationed everywhere in the world are you and i) crashing around the globe and blowing shit up, yet those of us in God’s country should face no threat. And for the most part, we don’t face any threat. Nobody’s bombed any of the weddings i’ve been to over the last few years. I’ve never thought, “I don’t think i should go downtown, because somebody might suicide bomb where i shop.” I’m convinced that the Canadians will launch their plan for world domination any day, by invading the social and evolutionary cul-de-sac of America where i live. But as of yet i have not had to contend with RCAF close air support in the neighborhood.
Still here we are, gripped by fear and willing to submit to whatever the organs say is necessary to protect us. Hunter S. Thompson used to say that we’re a nation of pigs. I disagree. (Unless he was being Orwellian.) The comparison is unfair to that noble and intelligent, barnyard beast. We’re a nation of five year-olds whose parents don’t say, “No, no, there’s no bogeyman in the closet because there’s no such thing as the bogeyman.” Our parents keep telling us that the bogeyman is real and he’s out to get us. He could be in any, or every, closet. In fact, he probably is in every closet!

UPDATE 2 - Lawyers, Guns and Money introduces the new Washington game of Terrorball.

..the place that is the home base of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This Phoenix New Times article shows quite clearly the extent of the contempt that "Sheriff Joe" and his sycophantic cohorts appear to have for due process and any legal system official who dares (as they see it) to hold them to account. Truly scary stuff.
Of course, the really sad part of this is that Arpaio has been re-elected to his position by the local electors almost more times than I have had hot dinners, which, sadly, tends to play into the hands of those who propose intelligence tests for voters.
UPDATE - A summary of recent events here, throwing into sharp relief the reality that (as ever) Arizona political and justice system leadership, having failed to push back on Arpaio in the past, has now, by benign neglect, created a monster. Has nobody in leadership learned a damned thing from the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy?

In which Verizon and Yahoo are fighting an FOIA request for information about how much they charge to tap and pass customer data to the Federal Government.
This explains what happened next:

...before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies -- and to 'shock' their customers."
"Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies," the company writes.

Commenter Nomen Nescio helpfully provides you with a translation:

Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security

"if people knew our reputation for protecting their privacy was wholly undeserved and false, we might lose that reputation."

no shit, sherlock. let me translate that complaint into even plainer english: "please, mr. judge your honor, don't make us tell the truth to our customers! they might quit being our customers if we had to be truthful to them!"

Apparently Sen. Chuck Schumer called a US Airways flight attendant "bitch" under his breath after being asked to shut off his cell phone at the start of a flight.
I suppose that one should not be too surprised at a politician using profanity. When Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself", he kind of lowered the bar for future political discourse.
However, what is more amusing is the response of Schumer's spokesperson when Schumer was busted:

Schumer's spokesman later apologized for the incident, say that the senator "made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn't have made, and he regrets it."

This is a classic example of a non-apology apology. Schumer should either have said "sorry" or said nothing. By issuing this statement, he merely comes across as a classic egotistical weasel.
Larry Bossidy, in one of his excellent books on leadership, explains that when he was the CEO of Allied Signal, he used to take candidates for leadership positions out to dinner, and see how they treated other people in the restaurant. If they were rude to the servers, then he did not want them in the corporation because they were not nice people. As my father once told me, good manners cost nothing. Chuck Schumer scores an Epic Fail on the Larry Bossidy scale for sure.

From time to time, Formula 1 teams have been bilked or short-changed by sponsors. The nature of F1, with its glamour, glitz and seemingly unbelievable sums of money, makes it an easy haven for swindlers and "characters" of all types.
This year's sponsorship scandal is The Sponsorship That Never Was. It centers around Brawn GP, who claim to have concluded a very large (130 million Euros) multi-year deal with the German corporation Henkel. Henkel has been a sponsor before - they bought space on the McLaren cars for a couple of years recently. However, they then left F1.
The deal was supposedly concluded in July 2009, at a time when Brawn GP was performing well on the racetrack (Jenson Button had won 6 races in the first part of the season) and the team was looking to parlay its on-track success to sign long-term deals to allow it to continue beyond the 2009 season, the budget for which came mostly from Honda.
However, it now seems that the sponsorship deal was not what some of the parties think it was. Henkel is now claiming that the people supposedly negotiating on its behalf were (a) not authorized to conclude a deal of this size without board-level approval, and (b) that key documents purporting to commit Henkel to the deal with Brawn GP contained the forged signature of the CEO of Henkel, making them invalid. On this basis, Henkel has commenced legal action in Germany to have the contract declared null and void.
This news has become public only after a 75% stake in Brawn GP was sold to Mercedes, which is renaming the team Mercedes Grand Prix.
There are several interesting aspects to the story. Firstly, given the vertical nature of decision-making in most German corporations, there is no way a decision of this kind, involving the expenditure of in excess of 30 million Euros a year, could have been taken without Supervisory Board and CEO approval by Henkel. If Brawn GP were presented with a letter supposedly signed by the CEO, this might have been convincing, but I would personally have wanted evidence that it represented the outcome of a Supervisory Board meeting.
I do not believe that Mercedes were ignorant of the issue prior to purchasing the majority stake in the Brawn team. The CEO of Mercedes and the CEO of Henkel apparently discussed the contract in September 2009, at which time Henkel advised Mercedes that as far as they were concerned, no such deal existed. Mercedes therefore knew about the issue before concluding the deal to buy the 75% stake in Brawn GP.
However, if this deal (which would, given current sponsorship rates in F1, have given Henkel a lot of car space - even title sponsor billing) does not exist, and Henkel can convince the courts in Germany that it is null and void, Mercedes GP and Mercedes-Benz has a large budgetary hole to fill in 2010 and beyond.
All of this explains the recent interest by Mercedes GP in hiring Michael Schumacher. If you have a 35 million Euro shortfall in your budget, what better way to plug it than by signing the most popular German sportsman of the last 40-50 years? Henkel might even be persuaded to stump up some cash in 2010 for space on a car with Michael Schumacher driving it. Signing Schumacher out of retirement is one of the few ways in which Mercedes could hope to bring large amounts of income to Mercedes GP. The sums of money involved in F1 are still too large for Mercedes to have a hope of finding one corporation with 35 million Euros not allocated for marketing spend in 2010. However, it is possible that 5 or 6 German corporations could be persuaded to stump up 4-5 million Euros each for a car driven by Michael Schumacher in 2010. Mercedes always wanted to have Schumacher drive for them in Formula 1, but their failure to lock him up contractually in the early 90's when he drove for them in sportscars allowed him to escape to Benetton and thence to Ferrari.
I therefore regard the affair as another example of the old adage "in Formula 1, just follow the money". Brawn GP looks to have been fooled into signing what turned out to be a non-existent deal with Henkel (the perpetrators of the deal from the Henkel side are now in deep water, with criminal charges for fraud and embezzlement likely), which leaves Mercedes with a large budgetary hole to fill for the next 2-3 years. What better way to fill it than by luring Michael Schumacher out of retirement?

Over at Ed Brayton's excellent blog "Dispatches From The Culture Wars", part of the indubitably excellent Scienceblogs aggregation, we find this discussion based on yet another report concerning the low reliability of eyewitness accounts of anything, but especially crimes. Having read an article about the crash of the DH-110 at the 1952 Farnborough Air Show, where virtually none of the eyewitness accounts were correct, I was already attuned to the fundamental issues with "live" accounts of events. There is a similar correlation with the Kennedy assassination, where numerous eye-witnesses provided a baffling array of contradictory accounts.
This topic is also explored in detail in the book "Mistakes Were Made, (but not by ME)", which is one of my favorite books of 2009. The book points out that the criminal justice system is deeply resistant to any attempts at reform, because the culture surrounding its practitioners is one of asserted infallibility, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

Background: Ramsgate has a fully-equipped ferry port, built some years ago on land reclaimed from the sea West of the current harbour. The ferry port had freight and passenger sailings for a number of years, until the previous company bailed on the arrangement with lots of years left on the lease. Since then, the port has survived on a limited number of freight-only ferry sailings, while the harbour has to be constantly dredged due to sand infill from ocean currents. In short, this is not a shining example of local industry or success.
This year, there were rumours, talked up by the local MP Dr. Steven Ladyman, that EuroFerries would restart passenger services from Ramsgate to Boulougne in France this Autumn. This seemed to be a positive development, except that no date was announced to begin with, then no news was forthcoming other than postponements, accompanied by vague assurances. When local blogger East Cliff Richard linked to another local blog where a commenter referred to a rumour that EuroFerries might have "gone bust", EuroFerries threatened him with legal action. They did the same to the local blogger whose comments section contained the alleged rumour.
I think that I understand the policy being adopted here by EuroFerries (who are very much still in business, by the way). It's called either Shoot The Common Carrier (if you're feeling charitable) or School Playground Bullying (if like me, you are not feeling quite as charitable).
Most recently, EuroFerries has admitted that it will not be starting services this year after all. Sailings are now not planned to start until March 2010.
The net result of all of the false starts is a reduction in the credbility of the local MP, and deepening local skepticism about the likelihood that there will be a resumption of passenger ferry services out of Ramsgate.
As for EuroFerries themselves, any organization that thinks that threatening local bloggers whose comment sections contain statements of which they disapprove is a good way to go about its business is either stupid, being badly advised, or both. No good can come of threatening local commentators with legal action, especially since in this case, they were not even the ones making any allegations - the allegations were being made by an anonymous commenter to a blog. It merely makes Euroferries look like a typical bunch of corporate bullies - and nobody likes corporate bullies.
UPDATE - I rewrote parts of this posting to better explain what I think actually occurred to cause EuroFerries to threaten the two bloggers in question with legal action. My conclusion that EuroFerries is engaging in bullying, hiding behind UK libel laws, still stands. I repeat - just because you can do something does not mean that you should. Smarter thinking should have prevailed.
UPDATE 2 - There is a discussion forum about the Euroferries initiative here. I rest my case about the general level of skepticism...

This article in BNet explains how Australia has weathered the recession better than most countries, and may be already in economic recovery.

Both Uganda and Jamaica are currently gripped by a nasty approach to homosexuality - they appear to regard it as an anti-social disease, and are actively working to criminalize it.
That being the case, I refuse to visit either country. When they wise up and stop enshrining bigotry and discrimination based on sexual orientation into their laws and societal value systems, I shall consider visiting them and buying products from those countries. Until then, they're not getting a cent of my money.

...is an old truism in the history of malfeasance. Currently my home state is proving the truth of this. It is highly likely that they executed an innocent man, Cameron Tood Whillingham, in 2004.
Now, in a highly suspicious turn of events, Texas Governor Rick Perry has suddenly dismissed several members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission that was due to report on the events leading up to the execution. He is trying to replace the dismissed members with hard-line authoritarians.
I have not recently seen a more blatant example of "stacking the deck" for many years. However, on another level, Perry's actions do not particularly surprise me. As Carol Tavris and Elliott Aronson point out in their book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By ME)", the criminal justice system is a very good example of a system that persistently refuses to admit to error, even when the errors are egregious and obvious. Cover-ups and general avoidance and malfeasance are normal responses when that system is challenged by evidence of failure.
In any sensible legally policed jurisdiction, Rick Perry would not even have tried such a blatant piece of gerrymandering. However, this is Texas, a state that does not even allow criminal defendants the right of discovery (the term used by lawyers in this state is "trial by ambush"). In that context, it is less surprising that the state does not want to have to admit that the criminal justice system here is defective.
I would like to think that electors will take note of this malfeasance by Perry. However, given that they had one previous opportunity to toss him from office and failed to take it, I am not optimistic.
UPDATE - There are claims in the Houston Chronicle that Gov Perry's office refused to consider late submissions before the execution of Whillingham. This is potentially serious, the allegation is that Rick Perry deliberately refused to consider new evidence. Beware the comments section however, the intellectually dishonest authoritarian bottom-feeders are out in force with their peurile arguments and petty ad hominems...
UPDATE 2 - Gov. Perry has now commented on this case, only to utter a string of ad hominems and fallacies. Nowhere in his monologue does he address the underlying issue - that Cameron Todd Whillingham was executed on the basis of inadequate evidence. No amount of bluff and bluster can avoid that unpalatable reality.
UPDATE 3 - Another miscarriage of justice (this time the subversion and undermining of the appeal system) is also unfolding in Texas over a man sentenced to death, where it is apparent that jurors used Bibles as they determined whether he should be sentenced to death. Lawyers for the man on death row explain how they were denied the ability to ask jurors questions that would have proved their arguments...my cynical expectation is that Rick Perry will refuse to intervene in order to burnish his "tough on crime" credentials. The "hang 'em high" brigade has a lot of membership, particularly in rural areas of Texas.

This interesting blog has appeared, promising information about developments on Shemya, which is not quite the back of beyond in the Aleutians, but is close...

For those people not just returned from Mars....film director Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding arrest warrant from the USA, issued after he fled the U.S. over 40 years ago while awaiting sentencing following a plea of guilty to what has been quaintly termed "statutory rape".
His arrest has led to massive amounts of bloviation both by supporters, who appear to want the whole issue swept under the carpet, and detractors who appear to want him at the very least forced to do the perp walk, or possibly (as in the case of the unutterably stupid Cokie Roberts), have him put to death.
Watching all of the huffing, puffing and pontification about Polanski does rather tend to remind me of the quotation "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Armchair moralists everywhere seem to be united in wanting to weigh in with their own views of the whole affair.
Commenter jeer9 on HaloScan, responding to this posting on Lawyers, Guns and Money, seems to hit the nail on the head for me:

...Polanski already pled guilty to statutory rape. After 42 days of psychiatric observation, he fled when he believed the judge was not going to abide by the agreement. By failing to stay and litigate the issue and serve the appropriate sentence (which, short of execution, will not satisfy some), he has incurred the retrospective wrath of Americans everywhere which no amount of money or energy will dissipate. There's a large moral lesson to be learned here somewhere, but I'm far too obtuse, what with the distractions of Wall Street criminal passes and the relentless prosecution of torturers, to be able to see it. I seriously doubt, given the judge's inappropriate conduct, that he'll serve any time (other than probation) on the sexual charge. The fugitive count is another matter. He should have just stayed and fought it with with the sort of representation the wealthy and privileged can afford. Americans prefer their evildoers to be brazen and unrepentant. Fleeing the country lacks the self-righteous bravado we appreciate in our villains and speaks to a type of cowardice that is simply not tolerated. Better to lawyer up (would that it were necessary!) and retire to a quiet life in Dallas or appear on TV regularly defending one's sadism as the height of patriotism. It's all about priorities and we sure have ours straight.

A classic indicator of the health of a housing market is the number of months of inventory that exists. During property price recessions, the amount of inventory shoots up dramatically. Generally, prices then drop since it becomes a buyers market. Appreciating housing markets generally run with 4-6 months of inventory at current sale rates.
During the recent crash, inventories had ballooned in some areas to years' worth of houses. Housing market optimists have been watching to see for signs of improvement that they can point to as evidence of a recovery. There have been recent drops in outstanding inventory in some distressed areas, particularly California, which have led to optimistic noises that the housing market is recovering.
Not so fast. As Dr. Housing Bubble explains in this posting, there is an additional factor that needs to be added to any calculation of housing recovery - Shadow Inventory. It is difficult to excerpt from this posting, but the argument in the posting is that there are a lot of properties with delinquent mortgages, where the lenders have not even issued Notices Of Default. This is mainly because they do not want to have to admit that a loan is delinquent, because then it damages the value of their loan portfolio. This merely kicks the problem down the road; although no NoD has been issued (which means that the foreclosure process does not start, and the property does not appear in pre-Foreclosure or Foreclosure stats), the loan is delinquent and may never be made good, which means that either the lender writes off the debt, or forecloses the property later.
The reluctance of lenders to assume responsibility for failing loans is not new - we have already seen numerous instances of lenders refusing to take formal possession of properties where borrowers walked away from them, thus leaving the borrowers still with legal title to the property and still liable for property and state taxes etc.
My guess is that lenders are hoping to somehow bury these defaulting loans when the overall market recovers, either by quietly negotiating away the debt, or by foreclosing the property and hoping to bury the foreclosure amidst other good news. However, no matter what happens, this "shadow inventory" issue exists, and it will slow the recovery of the housing market. As long as a significant number of homeowners are delinquent on mortgage payments, and very likely to ultimately default, the real level of distress in the market is higher than shown by foreclosure stats.

Glenn Beck, like many authoritarian radio and TV bloviators, is very good at creating strawman arguments that allow him to commence some rant about some real or imagined Awful Thing About The World.
Some time ago, a satirist parodied Beck's approach to bloviation here.
Now Glenn Beck, a man who by his own written words, hates international law, has filed a complaint against the owner of the website with...the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The owner of the website has responded with some fairly pointed arguments against what seems to be a rather flimsy complaint.
Beck originally threatened a libel suit against the site owner, but that would almost certainly fail since the site is demonstrably satirical.
I do love it when bullies suddenly find themselves on the recieving end of a take-down. Suddenly they morph from bloviation, bullying and vaguely threatening speech and triumphalist crowing to pathetic special pleading and allegations of persecution.
Cry me a river, Glenn Beck. I sense the biter bit, the bully being called out.

This article from the San Antonio News reveals that the police department and the Mayor of Tenaha in East Texas have apparently been egregiously abusing asset forfeiture laws. These laws, originally designed to allow for the confiscation of assets owned by convicted felons, have been abused (in some cases egregiously) for years by many law enforcement agencies. They are attractive laws to abuse, since seized assets can be used to offset the rising cost of law enforcement.
In the case of the city of Tenaha, the asset forfeiture abuse went hand-in-hand with that old legal invention of Driving While Black. A local lawyer has now filed a lawsuit as a result of investigating numerous forfeiture incidents in Tenaha. As the L.A. Times reports:

David Guillory, an attorney in nearby Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.
But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cellphones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly -- and discovered that all but one of them were black.

The citizen leadership of Tenaha appears to be in total denial about the egregiousness of this bullshit:

Tenaha Mayor George Bowers, 80, defended the seizures, saying they allowed a cash-poor city the means to add a second police car in a two-policeman town and help pay for a new police station.
“It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force,” Bowers said.
Local police, he said, must take aggressive action to stem the narcotics trade that flows through town via U.S. 59 — drugs heading north, cash going south.
“No doubt about it. (U.S. 59) is a thoroughfare that a lot of no-good people travel on. They take the drugs and sell it and take the money and go right back into Mexico,” said Bowers, who’s been Tenaha’s mayor 54 years.

I guess my question to George Bowers is: what part of the phrase "probable cause" do you not understand? My question to the electors of Tenaha: do you realize that you have a fuckwit representing you?
UPDATE - News of the lawsuit has now gone national, via this article in CNN. The article itself adds little that was not already public information, but it further provides much negative publicity. Way to go, Tenaha.
UPDATE 2 - The District Attorney is now attempting to use money confiscated by the Tenaha law enforcement body to fund a defense of the asset forfeiture policy...sometimes there is no way that you could make this stuff up...

One of the last commercial reasons for businesses to visit Adak has failed...the island's fish processing plant filed for bankruptcy on September 17th. As this report explains:

According to court documents, Adak Fisheries owes money to between 100 and 199 different creditors. Independence Bank told the court they alone are owed about $6.5 million from three different loans in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The bank says the lines of credit were issued based on bogus invoices sent by Adak Fisheries and were secured by all of the processing plant's assets, including their equipment and inventory.

This sounds like gross incompetence at the very least, and possibly fraud, on behalf of the owners and managers of the fish processing plant. However, I also have no idea how or why Independence Bank was persuaded to lend that much money in three separate tranches to a struggling business in an inhospitable part of the world. The phrase "bogus invoices" suggests that some sort of fraud investigation is in order. It must be something in the water...in the meantime, the failure of the plant removes one of the last reasons for fisheries to stop in Adak, and makes the economic scene on the island even more bleak. As the article also explains:

Adak city manager Chuck Mohn said the community of about 100 has very few economic opportunities beyond the fish processing plant. Adak Fisheries and the boats it attracted to the area provided the community with sales, fuel, and fish tax revenue. Mohn said he's not sure if they can keep the city running without it.

There is some discussion of the events here.

Adak is described by one blogger as "The End of America". His blog here does a really good job of tracking the history and current existence of Adak, which over the last 15 years has gone from a massive post-Cold War military facility to a run-downm, economically marginal community eking out a living from unpredictable fishing.
This is an updated Wikipedia page for Adak that was inexplicably deleted. It gives a lot of information about this windy hellhole that is not on the "official" Wikipedia entry.
This is an account of a trip to Adak in 2006. It gives some idea of the remoteness, general decay and struggles that the island's residents operate under.
The latest event in the ongoing saga of Adak's power supply problems is that a new electricity supply utility has been assigned the job of electric power generation. TDX started to supply power on Adak on December 1st instead of Adak Electric, whose license has been revoked after numerous allegations of malfeasance.
Here is another account of a trip to Adak by a visitor who spent over a week there, and got to talk to a lot of residents.

...is very evident in the online responses to this article in Wired magazine, summarizing research by scientists that shows that torture is really a poor and ineffective mechanism for obtaining useful information in any context.
The article comments are notable for a number of instances of what I term drive-By bloviation. The commenters in question appear to be contemptuous of any conclusion based on research (you know, pesky stuff like facts, evidence and logical reasoning), since They Already Know The Right Answer. In this case, The Right Answer usually revolves around unfettered abuse during interrogation of prisoners, including more torture (surprise, surprise). The fact that the research under discussion in the article is not exactly unique or an outlier (there are numerous studies of interrogation techniques that have mostly reached exactly the same general conclusions) also appears to have been overlooked, although I have found over the years that one of the defining characteristics of drive-by bloviators is that they are totally incurious - they have no interest in doing any research or reading of their own, they simply jump on the first thing that they disagree with and savage it.
These people are contemptuous of science in all of its forms, have no understanding of the basic principles of jurisprudence (namely, that inconvenient presumption of innocence until compelling evidence to the contrary is discovered). Additionally they are insulting my intelligence and wasting my reading time by failing to even construct a semblance of an argument, although they certainly seem to like writing long and fine-sounding collections of high-and-mighty sounding phrases and sentences, which would probably sound great at the local bar over a few beers, but when written down, simply read like the pompus utterances of conceited, know-nothing drunks.
These people wouldn't know a sensible argument if it bit them in the ass, and more notably, they don't want to recognize the existence of any argument or information that would threaten or puncture the echo-chamber that they appear to live in.
It is also notable that most of the commenters are posting once then are never to be seen again. They clearly have no interest in a debate, they are Right.
In short, many of these comments are mediocre, ignorant, nonsense - the worst kind of ignorant drive-by bloviation.
UPDATE - One thing I have discovered over the years is that authoritarians are deeply unhappy when they are confronted by scientists and other learned and educated people attempting to point out that their worldviews are fundamentally fallacious and flawed. Just try putting a politician and a criminologist on the same stage and watch how long it takes for the politician to start dismissing the criminologist's views on law and order as "out of touch", "in an ivory tower" etc. etc. Usually the politicians are pandering to electors by suggesting authoritarian and useless answers to complex law and order issues, and the criminologists are often pointing out that if, by golly, the solution is all so damn simple (usually some variant on "Hang 'em High"), why (a) has it not been tried decades ago, and (b) why is it being suggested for the nth time in decades? (hint: perhaps It Doesn't Work).

...are explored in this article by former NFL player Ross Tucker, where he explains, that while fans are only too willing to come down hard on players who demand that their contracts be re-negotiated, the reverse is often true:

I received a call from an active player around 10 a.m. last Saturday, the day teams reduced their roster to 53. His team had just informed him (via his agent) that he would be released if he didn't agree to a significant pay cut. The player had about two hours to think it over and get back to his organization. No pressure, right?

...Most fans dislike when players sit out OTAs or training camp while angling for a new contract. The consensus seems to be that players should honor their signed deals. That's a fine thought, of course, but in this case, which party isn't honoring the long-term contract? As it stands, I think these conversations happen more often than we realize, they just aren't publicized.

As Tucker explains, the gambit of demanding that a player reduce his salary or be released has been played a number of times by teams in this off-season. When you add to that the fact that a team can cut a player at any time (if it can absorb the cap hit), the deck suddenly does not look to be stacked in the favour of the players.
Tucker's musing hits the big issue:

...I think the time will come when a player takes the next step in the game of leverage that is constantly being waged between front offices and players. If a player wants his outdated contract redone or, better yet, wants the team to cut him and put him on the lucrative free-agent market, then withholding services for a regular season or playoff game is the biggest card a player can play.

Will it happen this year? Maybe not. Will it happen soon. I think it will.

...now being discussed in Consumerist, which is reporting on elaborate legal actions being mounted by Cash4Gold to silence ex-employees.

It is difficult to conclude that there is something wrong with the current coaching model in the NFL.

For a start, here is the list of Superbowl-winning coaches who recently left teams and are currently sitting out:

Brian Billick
Bill Cowher
Tony Dungy
Jon Gruden
Mike Holmgren
Mike Martz
Mike Shanahan

The interesting thing to note here is that Dungy, Holmgren and Cowher all walked away from the game, they were not forced out or fired.

In the "unlikely to coach again but that is not certain until the coffin lid slams shut" category we have:

Mike Ditka
Jimmy Johnson
Dan Reeves
George Siefert
Marty Schottenheimer
Barry Switzer

Former Head Coaches on NFL staffs:

Cam Cameron
Dave Campo
Scott Linehan
Rod Marinelli
Mike Mularkey
Mike Nolan
Gregg Williams

Former head coaches currently sitting it out or employed elsewhere

Romeo Crennel
Herm Edwards
Dennis Erickson
Jim Fassel
Chan Gailey
Dennis Green
Jim Haslett
Lane Kiffin
Bobby Petrino

This is a pretty long list of top-flight coaches. This does not include other coaches who decided to pass up the opportunity of being an NFL head coach and instead moved to the college game (Charlie Weis, Dave Wannstedt). Add a couple of other coaches who tried out the NFL and decided that college was more fun (Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban).
Right now, because of the trend towards hiring younger coaches, we have a number of NFL head coaches in their early to mid 30's. This clearly can work (see Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh) if there is continuity in the coaching staff.
In addition to the massive number of former head coaches either bouncing around other jobs or sitting on the sidelines, the firing of 3 offensive co-ordinators in one week in pre-season is unprecedented.
In the case of the Buffalo Bills, the firing of Turk Schonert is probably a result of results pressure on head coach Dick Jauron, who will almost certainly be fired if the Bills do not make it into the playoffs. The fact that Jauron and his assistants were summoned to meet with Bills owner Ralph Wilson suggests that they are collectively operating with a very short rope that could rapidly tighten to a noose. The poor performance of the Bills' new no-huddle offense in pre-season left the Bills looking for answers, and firing the OC is a pretty good answer, for now. Whether it will improve the operation of the offense, only time will tell. The remainder of the offensive staff is inexperienced, which does not inspire a lot of confidence. Even with Terrell Owens, the Bills offense is unlikely to strike terror into opposing teams. They may simply double-team him out of existence, and then rely on the overall mediocrity of the rest of the offense to throttle the Bills and win games.
In the case of the firing of Chan Gailey by new Chiefs coach Todd Haley, this can be explained in terms of Haley being a coach with an offensive background who wants to call the plays himself. This is not new in NFL head coaching circles. A lot of head coaches call or called the offensive plays themselves. Thinking of past coaches we have Bill Parcells, Mike Holmgren, Mike Martz to name but three. Gailey was a holdover from the Herm Edwards era, but sooner or later Haley and he would probably have clashed over offensive play-calling, especially since Gailey is more conservative than Haley.
The case of the firing of Jeff Jagodzinski in Tampa Bay is the most puzzling, but also in many ways the most revealing. Although Bucs coach Raheem Morris seemed determined to obfuscate over the real reasons for Jagodzinski's dismissal, there were plenty of leaks from with the Bucs organization attempting to explain the underlying reason for his firing.
Most of the reasons however, appear to me to be symptomatic of the fact that Jagodzinski, unlike many other NFL coaches, seems to think that a head coach is there to set direction, and then get out of the way and let his assistants coach. He deferred most of the play-calling and coaching details to his assistants, only providing directional input on plays. This apparently led to issues when the Bucs tried game simulations, and the multiple coaches involved in relaying plays to the quarterback led to delay of game penalties. However, by all accounts, the Bucs additionally wanted him to be wading into all of the little details of running an NFL offense, going beyond the zone-blocking scheme for which he had become known from his previous NFL time with the Atlanta Falcons. When he declined to do that, the conclusion that the Bucs seemed to reach was that he was in over his head.
While the firing of Jagodzinski sounds like a classic mismatch of expectations on both sides, it is also revealing. The NFL coaching model appears to place a high premium on head coaches and co-ordinators engaging in detail coaching activities. Jagodzinski, who came back into the NFL from Boston College, where he had been the head coach (but was fired after he interviewed for the vacant New York Jets head coaching position), seemed to have evolved a model where he delegated a lot of detail work to his co-ordinators and position coaches. This apparently did not sit at all well with Raheem Morris or the Bucs front office.
From observing recent events, it appears that offensive co-ordinators who try to delegate too much detail work being labelled as incompetent or out of their depth, while co-ordinators who are working for a head coach who was previously an offensive co-ordinator risk being emasculated, and ultimately rendered disposable. It is interesting that we do not see the same model of head coaches calling defensive strategy in games, even though a lot of head coaches have defensive backgrounds. Most head coaches are content to have the defensive co-ordinator run that side of the team.
All of which suggests to me that the overall coaching model, when compared to a conventional business, is decidedly dysfunctional. It also appears that the youth movement in coaching has taken over to a ludicrous extent, when coaches like Mike Shanahan, Jon Gruden, Tony Dungy and Bill Cowher are sitting on the sidelines collecting money from their previous franchises for doing nothing.

Courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, some revelations about unscrupulous shit-like behaviour from Richard Nixon, who spent a lot of time and energy trying to dig dirt on Senator Edward Kennedy in case he ran against him in the 1972 Presidential election. Gosh, wasn't Tricky Dickie a class act?
A Republican candidate for elective office in Idaho is caught laughing along with a moonbat meeting attendee who thinks it would be cool to issue Obama hunting tags. When called on it, he claims he was "being sarcastic". Sure you were being sarcastic. I have a bridge near New York to sell you, and you're an un-American little dipshit too.
A Republican representative is surprised when his false claims about medical treatment denial are shouted down at a town hall meeting...priceless.
Simon Dee, who was Britain' first TV chat show host, and for a period of three years was just about the biggest celebrity in the UK, before he abruptly fell to earth, died at the age of 74. His was a textbook example of zero-to-hero-to-zero, and what happens when you start to believe all of your own propaganda...however, his style and brash "ladies man" persona lives on in the Austin Powers movies.

For some time now, I have tended to drink relatively little in the way of non-diet sodas. This is partly because I have been (successfully) working to lose weight - down from 242 pounds in the early Summer to to 222 now. I am working to get down to less than 210 pounds by October.
One non-diet soda that I have not yet given up, however, is Coke, as long as it is Mexican Coke. Several years ago I found large bottles of Mexican Coke in Central Market in Dallas, and made the discovery that a lot of other people have made - that this variant of Coke actually tastes like Coke as I remember it when growing up. The reason appears to be because it is sweetened with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, which has almost totally displaced sugar as a drink sweetener in the USA because of cost.
This article explains how Coca-Cola is not happy that Coke is being imported from Mexico in this way, although the imports are not illegal since there is no counterfeiting of merchandise occurring.
Coca-Cola's attempts to stop these imports might be due to its contractual arrangements with bottlers in various territories and legal jurisdictions, but they are counter-productive. Afficionados of this variant of Coke are prepared to pay a hefty premium for it. I currently pay around $20 a case of 24 bottles for it at Costco. That is around $0.83 a bottle - a lot more than I would pay for a similar-capacity can of US Coke.
A naive person like me wonders why Coca-Cola does not simply sell it on import and collect most of the revenue for its US operation, instead of having to tolerate "gray market" imports and then whine about them. There is clearly a significant demand for this variant of Coke in the USA. But no matter, in the meantime I will continue to enjoy a cold bottle of "The Real Thing" on the patio in the evenings. Viva Mexico!

The article explains it very neatly:

Gordon Klingenschmitt is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who claims he sacrificed his 16-year career in the military and a million dollar pension because he was targeted for praying publicly in Jesus’ name while serving as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy.
...but those claims are flat-out lies.

The article sketches out the whole story, which shows that Klingenschmitt was fired from the Navy for disobeying the valid order of a superior officer. His whole public persona since then has been built around the concept that he is a religious martyr. In the process he has created an entirely false persona and is attempting to BS his way through the rest of his life pretending that he is the victim of religious persecution.
I am shocked, but not surprised that once again, lacking any legitimate justification for his actions, a Christian is wallowing in lies, BS and martyrdom. Having seen it in the Evolution vs. Creation debate all over the USA, it appears to be more widespread than I suspected.

Eric Boehlert in Media Matters has gotten around to neatly summarizing what I concluded many moons ago - the mass media and commentators in this country are a bunch of myopic, biased fools. As he reminds us:

As early as June 2003, The New York Times was fretting over whether Howard Dean's "angry message" would be his downfall. "All the Rage," read a Newsweek headline on a Dean profile.
And in two features in the summer of 2003, The Washington Post described Dean as "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant," "disrespectful," "fiery," "red-faced," a "hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up," and "fired up." And trust me, none of those adjectives was used in a complimentary way. In fact, the Post took pains to distinguish Dean's anger from that of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the paper termed "brilliantly cranky."

But oh my, how times have changed! Suddenly this summer, as right-wing mini-mobs turn health care forums into free-for-alls, as unhinged political rage flows in the streets, and as the Nazi and Hitler rhetoric flies, anger is in. Suddenly anger is good. It's authentic. It's newsworthy. Reading and watching the mini-mob news coverage, the media message seems clear: Angry speaks to the masses.
Instead of being turned off by the displays of passion the way they had been when liberal protesters took to the streets prior to the Iraq war, media elites have been touting the mini-mob trend as a "phenomenon" (USA Today) staffed by a "citizen army" (Bloomberg News).

As Boehlert then snarkily observes:

Bottom line: Liberal protesters don't tell us anything about the mood of America. But angry right-wingers do, according to the press.

There is plenty more in the article, but I will leave you to read it.
The bottom line is that what we are seeing in the town halls is not "democracy in action", nor is it any form of sensible manifestation of the democratic process. When people show up at a town hall and boo stories meant to illustrate the need for healthcare reform, that is not civil discourse. That is people behaving like mean-spirited moronic little shits. Neither is showing up outside a political meeting with an ostentatiously-displayed firearm.
To re-cycle an old saying, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I have heard no plausible rationalization for standing around outside a meeting about healthcare with a prominently-displayed firearm. I think I know what the real reason for that display is, and it has a lot to do with a desire to intimidate.
The bottom line is that nobody in the media currently appears to have the cojones to call many of the town hall protesters out for what they are: mean-spirited, bullying, misinformed and wilfully ignorant, and anti-American in the widest sense of the word. These people have no interest in the democratic process, sensible, intelligent, informed debate, or any form of co-operation. They are only interested in being loud, obnoxious, threatening and unconstructive. Time to call this bunch of jerks for what they are. Of course they will whine and wave their hands and complain about "media bias", but guess what? All bullies whine and do that when they are told to knock it off. All that is needed is for the message to be repeated and reinforced enough times, then they will fold and slink off back to where they came from.
Time to call crappy behaviour for what it is, folks.
UPDATE - One of the less edifying features of the town hall rabble is that in many cases, the elected representatives whose meetings they are disrupting seem unable or unwilling to muster the cojones to face down and call out their insane and sinister prattlings. Wally Herger (R-Redding) can be seen in this video apparently failing to object in any way to the rantings of an attendee at his meeting, who seems to see no issue in describing himself as a "right-wing terrorist".
Herger clearly could not even remember to remind him of the famous saying that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. I tend to think that Herger is below fuckwit status in his reaction to this nonsense, he appears to be engaging in the worst kind of nodding-dog pandering.

The former Mayor of Carrollton, Becky Miller, managed to get a Texas Monthly Bum Steer Award this year. On her bio, she claimed a number of achievements (such as being a backup singer for Jackson Browne) that were found to be, er, fabrications.
One would think that with the rise of this pesky thing called the Internet, which allows for fact-checking a lot faster and more efficiently, that public office candidates would be a lot more wary of peddling BS in their resumes or bios. However, it seems that Becky Miller was one of those people who thinks that you can fool a lot of people all of the time.
Miller ended up losing her re-election race in May by 9 percentage points. The victory may not necessarily be a good thing in terms of city policy, since her winning opponent, Ron Branson, appears to have a severely reflexive and rather mean-spirited sounding anti-immigrant position. However, given that Miller led early voting by 9 points, it seems that revelations of her "creativity" in writing about her earlier life did contribute to her defeat.

George Lakoff, whose book "Moral Politics" comes the closest of any book I have read to explaining why so many people have been persuaded to vote for policies that are against their own best interests, has a powerful new article on Huffington Post explaining why the Obama administration is having so many problems in the healthcare reform debate. And problems there most certainly are, with a new NBC poll showing that many of the falsehoods and myths being promulgated in the debate are gaining credence with the public, despite easily obtainable evidence that they are not correct.
To those of us who believe that policy topics should be rational and properly debatable points, this is nuts. Not so, says Lakoff, whose backround in Cognitive Science provides him with a different viewpoint, He calls the rational approach Policy Speak, and argues that it is failing:

PolicySpeak is the principle behind the President's new Reality Check Website. To my knowledge, the Reality Check Website, has not had a reality check. That is, the administration has not hired a first-class cognitive psychologist to take subjects who have been convinced by right-wing myths and lies, have them read the Reality Check website, and see if the Reality Check website has changed their minds a couple of days or a week later. I have my doubts, but do the test.
To many liberals, PolicySpeak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest
But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind PolicySpeak is just false. Certainly reason should be used. It's just that you should use real reason, the way people really think. Certainly the truth should be told. It's just that it should be told so it makes sense to people, resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Certainly new media should be used. It's just that a system of communications should be constructed and used effectively.
I believe that what went wrong is (a) the choice of PolicySpeak and (b) the decision to depend on the campaign apparatus (blogs, Town Hall meetings, presidential appearances, grassroots support) instead of setting up an adequate communications system.

Lakoff swiftly identifies one major weakness:

As for language, the term "public option" is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that's what it really is.
The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It's got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, "I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I'm fight for it here." Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

He later re-inforces another important underlying reality:

...the positive policy should have been made in moral terms, with clear and vivid language. The term "public option" is a PolicySpeak loser. The public is the American public, it is all of us, it is America, and it should have been called the American Plan.

There is a lot more good stuff in this article, which is rather long for a HuffPost article, but needs to be read by anybody interested in why the debate has unfolded the way that it has, and why (despite the manifest idiocy, dishonesty and cynicism of the opponents of health care change) the administration is still not making headway in the public debate.

...is that your past is going to be investigated, and if you have been remiss in your business or professional dealings, you will have questions to answer.
Former KIRO-TV Susan Hutchison, now running for political office in King County in Washington, probably wishes she could close Pandora's Box, but alas, the lid is open and the contents have escaped:

...Hutchison was suspended from work at KIRO-TV after calling in sick over the Fourth of July in 2002 and then being spotted canoeing in Oregon.
She had asked for vacation for those days but was turned down, according to a first, incomplete set of documents unsealed by a court order today.

The story is incomplete, since more court records are to be published after local media successfully argued that they should be released. However, the picture being painted by the current documents is not a flattering one; that of a prickly, obnoxious woman deceiving her employer and then trying to file lawsuits when she was terminated.
Hutchison is claiming that she is prevented from discussing her lawsuit by the terms of its settlement; however, KIRO-TV claims that the terms of the settlement simply prevent her from discussing the actual settlement details, and do not prevent her from discussing other aspects of her time at KIRO-TV.
King County electors ought to be taking this into account when deciding which way to vote...

Wait for it...courtesy of the Guardian newspaper:

A Florida man says his cat downloaded child pornography.
Police are charging Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Florida with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after finding more than 1,000 images on his personal computer.
Griffin told police he had been downloading music, and that his cat jumped on the keyboard when he left the room. He said "strange things" appeared on the computer when he returned.

...I was jerked back to UK reality after spending some time reviewing the attempts by fascists to disrupt US politician town halls, by this reminder that in the UK we have a related version of bad behaviour in the form of drunken tourists. This article in the Independent lays out the usual litany of alcohol-fuelled idiocy in the Greek islands and Crete.

...Malia, a resort that has become notorious for the bad behaviour of tourists. Locals are increasingly angered and exasperated – not least at the sight of couples copulating in public. Internet chat rooms and UK party sites publicising "all night" orgies have fanned the unruly and drunken behaviour in the resort. Residents have repeatedly taken to the streets to demand that Britons "stay away" and this week a shop owner in Malia meted out his own brand of justice by holding hostage for an entire day a tourist who had driven into his shop on a quad bike.

This sort of anti-social nonsense gets visited on hapless towns all over Europe every Summer thanks to a culture based on binge drinking. Warning to the USA - this is what you are also getting into by trying to stop people drinking under the age of 21 (one of the most futile legally-backed attempts to modify adolescent behaviour ever seen).
The sad thing is that the story never changes. Every year a significant number of drunken Brits end up cooling their heels in jails, from which they eventually get bailed. They then either get deported, or charged with criminal offenses to which they end up pleading guilty, with their defenders blaming alcohol for the bad behaviour. (An excuse which may stop being used once enough courts laugh at it then increase the sentence as punishment for ducking accountability). Once back in the UK they whinge and whine about "brutal police", while conveniently overlooking their own appalling behavioural pathology. This is lapped up by the media of course.
I would like for these people to be locked up for a while in the country that they have offended, then laughed back into the UK. I despair of morons like this. They appear to have minimal brainpower even when sober, but when drunk they seem to go to pieces.

#1 Orly Taitz
The rather eccentric lawyer (but only in CA via a correspondence course) appeared on MSNBC today to answer the rather pertinent question of why she is submitting as evidence in a court filing a "copy" of a Kenya birth certficate for Barack Obama that is a total forgery.
Her response to questioning was to accuse MSNBC of being "Obama's Brownshirts".
I have no idea where Orly Taitz has been hiding out for most of her life, but she clearly is a clueless idiot when it comes to lawyering and making friends. If that birth certificate is part of her legal filing in her lawsuit, I hate to think what the court is going to write in its ruling.

#2 Greg McMackin
The football coach at the University of Hawaii, who used an anti-gay slur in a press conference, after attempting to dig himself out of the hole, finally had to admit that he was in one:

The Hawaii football coach who used the word "faggot" three times to describe rival team Notre Dame during a press conference, then asked the press not report on his use of the antigay slur, has been suspended for 30 days without pay in addition to other penalties.
Greg McMackin, who attempted to apologize multiple times during the same press conference -- he said he hoped the press wouldn't report on what he said because he didn't "want to… have every homosexual ticked off at [him]" -- will also receive a 7-percent pay cut.

Frankly, I am somewhat surprised that McMackin still has a job, after exposing what is clearly an anti-gay animus about half a mile wide. Hey Greg, what does it feel like to be exposed as a bigoted wanker?

This recent incident, where Officer Crowley arrested a Harvard professor for disorderly conduct, only to have the local prosecutors pretty quickly drop the charges, is fascinating on a number of levels.
Having read (directly or indirectly) the accounts of both men, it seems clear to me that they both were not at their best during the encounter, and I suspect that they would both admit that in private.
The main challenge is that, having gone public with their narratives, they are now locked into their positions publicly. In addition, President Obama, having stated his opinion that the arrest of Professor Gates for disorderly conduct was "stupid", now has a public position to defend.
Since the original incident, and the decision by President Obama to comment on it, we have seen some rather predictable events unfold.
Firstly the police have closed ranks behind Officer Crowley, acting all hurt and demanding an apology from the President. The sight of a collection of pompous, huffing, barrel-chested authoritarians whining about the President making an obviously correct statement (whichever way you parse it, the decision to arrest Professor Gates was not a smart one) is not an attractive one, especially to the African-American community, for whom the Gates incident is yet another reminder of the many instances of racial profiling and general disrespect thrown their way over the years by law enforcement. I did not see a single African-American law enforcement official in the gathering, which further throws the position of law enforcement into sharp relief.
Secondly, and interestingly, President Obama seems to be using the incident as a "teaching moment" to try and get both sides to move beyond their hurt and indignation and see things differently. His decision to even get involved at all, and his investment of a lot of time behind the scenes in talking to both Officer Crowley and Professor Gates, tells me that he wants to use the incident as a means of moving discussions about race relations and the roles of the communities into a new zone. Whether he will succeed is an open question. Both law enforcement and the African-American communities tend to take refuge in predictable and inflexible positions when incidents like this occur.
Lastly, the incident has triggered a massive discussion about what happened/should have happened/did not happen, and also a wider discussion about the roles and responsibilities of both law enforcement and the public. The best discussion I have found so far is this one, triggered by a considered posting from a policing expert who has worked with law enforcement for many years.
The fact that such widespread discussion is occurring is further proof that, over 40 years after the passing of civil rights legislation, race is still a divisive issue in modern America. I see a lot of racism in the country still, wrapped up in coded language and distracting nonsense such as the "birther" controversy, which I see as nothing more than an attempt to de-legitimize a sitting President, and not a very good attempt at that. America needs to grow up rapidly in this and other areas if it wants to remain a top world power in the years to come.
UPDATE - From the Croked Timber discussion comes this excellent, nuanced response from a military veteran who has seen just about all sides of the issue in the past.
UPDATE 2 - One of the issues not highlighted in this whole incident is how the decision by Officer Crowley to arrest Prof. Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was in itself an abuse of the law. From the Reason blog we have this post by Radley Balko which explains why arresting Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was an abuse of the law; laws governing disorderly conduct were originally created to give the police methods of heading off riots and disturbances, not for the arrest of angry single citizens perceived as engaging in "contempt of cop".
The abuse of laws in this way is nothing new under the sun. In the 1960's and 1970's, the police in the UK engaged in racial profiling using an obscure law (the 1824 Vagrancy Act) which gave them (as they saw it) the ability to stop anybody on the street with little or no suspicion or probable cause. In practice, a lot of people became wearily used to being stopped, frisked and questioned under the dr facto pretext of "walking on the street while black". It took the Brixton Riots, the Scarman Report, and a whole heap of public anger before the police stopped abusing the act (the section of the act that was being abused became known as the "sus" law). There were other potential abuse mechanisms that the police also used, such as a law which made it an offense to be "equipped for theft". Apart from the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, it is difficult to find a more badly-written piece of law; under this law my bunch of car keys could be claimed to be "equipment for theft" in the eyes of a paranoid law enforcement official...

...so why is it that a Christian group paying for pro-religion billboards feels it necessary to just make shit up?
The blog Computing Intelligence has a suitable riposte:

"There is nothing so simultaneously dull and mentally detrimental as spending your Sunday morning in a church." - George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America.
Haven't heard that quotation before? That's because I just made it up. Chances are, George Washington never said that, but a lack of documented evidence for the attribution of a quotation is apparently no problem for some people. It would seem that a pair of theocratically minded citizens of the United States decided it was perfectly reasonable to make up a sentence that corresponded to their beliefs, and then slap that statement on a billboard and attribute it to George Washington.

However, if this is the way that some Christians want to behave in furtherance of their ideas and beliefs, I look forward to either calling BS on this, or getting into the business (like Computing Intelligence) of Making Stuff Up. Given the razor-sharp wits available at websites like Pharyngula, I am sure that we can out-BS them.
Bottom line though: these billboard charlatans are deceitful sacks of shit, hypocritical lying loons.
UPDATE - No sooner have I written this than another example pops up, this time from Oklahoma...you cannot make this stuff up.

1. Texas Secession and all that crap
Not to be outdone by Gov. Rick Perry's inane hints about secession, the Texas State Legislature is now getting in on the act, proposing to use up limited legislative time on a motion re-affirming the existence of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
Texas Rep. John Culbertson has also gotten in on the act, pointing out that Texas has the right to subdivide itself into up to 5 states. In his world, this somehow means that Texas can SHAZAM! morph into 5 states overnight, each with 2 Republican senators. Leaving aside any practical considerations of whether all the Senators would be Republican, Culbertson is either stupid or talking total BS, or both. The clause in the agreement by which Texas joined the Union which refers to Texas splitting also states that this must be done within the rules laid down in the U.S. Constitution i.e. the other states have to agree. Somehow I do not see other states agreeing to this sort of a split without some form of matching split (California, which has more electors than Texas, will probably want the same sort of split). Culbertson's bloviating nonsense is yet more evidence that the GOP in Texas are currently a whiny-ass bunch of losers.

2. That Darned Taxpayer Hotel in Dallas
Harlan Crow has spent in excess of $4 million on the campaign against the hotel and convention center backed by the Dallas City Council and the Mayor. I am getting tired of this group's adverts - they are slick and narrated by people with resonant well-modulated voices, but they are nothing more than innuendo-ridden polemical slams, mostly consisting of ad hominem attacks on Mayor Tom Leppert. Whenever I see a campaign like this relying almost exclusively on the ad hominem fallacy, my BS/sleaze meter gets pegged to the end-stop. Where's the argument?
There is also a rich vein of hypocrisy lurking in the adverts - Crow himself refuses to talk publicly about the campaign, claiming he wants it to be about issues, but as the Dallas Morning News has pointed out, one of the most recent adverts is nothing more than an ad hominem slam against Mayor Tom Leppert.
Crow's campaign is the most egregious example of special pleading (his family business just happens to own the Anatole hotels) that I have seen since the Dallas Cowboys spent millions to con the city of Arlington into ponying up for a second major-league sports stadium in 10 years. That campaign was similarly one-sided in terms of the amount of money being spent by the pro and anti stadium factions.
The Dallas Obsever has a fairly comprehensive article outlining the main facts and issues in this unfolding saga.
UPDATE - The ballot initiative to prevent Dallas City Council from supporting the hotel was narrowly voted down by the city voters.

3. The Big Bank Bailout
Here is a pretty cogent explanation for why the recent bank bailout was not a very good idea...

I was examining our Yahoo inbox the other day when I found another chain email sent by a friend. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have limited patience for chain emails, since they are usually reflexively forwarded by people who (in some cases) have not even bothered to read and understand the contents of the email.
This email deals with US healthcare reform, a vexed subject if ever there was one. It is a link to the website http://freeourhealthcarenow.com.
I went to the website. It purports to be a "group of concerned citizens". That twigged my BS meter straight away. A phrase like that, to me, has about as much credibility as somebody saying "you can trust me" when telling you a story.
To cut a long story short, after doing some fairly elementary research, I was able to write this reply to the sender:

I decided to do some research...the website freeourhealthcarenow.com is owned by the National Center for Policy Analysis. This organization is not "a group of concerned citizens". It is a pressure-group funded by a number of conservative organizations who have a track record of funding lobbying efforts, not just against government involvement in healthcare, but also against the idea that global warming actually exists, and in favour of reduced environmental regulation (this group has been funded by such environmentally responsible organizations as Exxon/Mobil in the past). See wikipedia.org for some information.
I would be leery of signing this petition, partly for this reason, but for a whole raft of related reasons:

1. We already have government involvement in health care in the form of Medicaid and MediCare, and I have yet to hear or read any compelling rationale for why those forms of healthare delivery do not deliver effective results. I hear lots of sniping against them by small-government lobbyists, but I do not see them being cut back or dismantled, which suggests that they are probably filling a need and have electoral support.
2. Most of the current debate around healthcare in the USA is not grounded in reality. This country spends around 13% of GDP on healthcare based on 2003-2005 WHO figures, and has worse healthcare metrics than many other westernized countries that spend a lot less on healthcare as a percentage of their GDP. Something is not working well in the system. Mouthing platitudes "we have the best healthcare in the world" while ignoring metrics looks to me to be rather like head-in-sand.
3. Empty slogans and phrases like "socialized medicine" fail to impress me or fill me with dread - that is what is in place in Canada, the UK, France and many other European countries, according to what I keep reading from the harbingers of doom. I have bad news. Those countries have not become sink-holes of government-run healthcare hell. I have lived in the UK, and visited European countries, I have friends in those countries. The system operates differently, but acute medical needs are taken care of. There is also the ability of anybody in those countries to pay for their own private treatment if they choose to do so. When I lived in the UK, I had private medical insurance paid for by my employer, but I never used it, because the National Healh System took care of my needs at the time.
4. There is a deep reflexive anti-government animus in the USA that has the effect of choking off any sensible debate about healthcare systems and options. The words "government" and "socialism" are bandied about like bogeymen in much the same way that "communist" was used as the ultimate demonizing phrase in the 1950's. Whenever I find myself reading slogans, I wonder where the argument is.
The petition request implies that government involvement reduces choice, but there is no argument to back up this assertion. The request relies on the reader making the reflexive connection "govenment = bad". My threshold for a compelling argument is a hell of a lot higher that that. If government really is bad, then somebody ought to have little trouble assembling an argument instead of a collection of linked assertions and slogans.
As you can probably tell, I would not sign a petition like this. It is a lobbying device being marketed by a free-market pressure group masquerading as "concerned citizens". That is BS deceptive marketing from the outset. The petition makes no case, it deals in empty sloganeering. That being the case, I regard it as a meangingless distraction. We should be having a deep and wide-ranging debate about healthcare, (now I am going to sound pompous and possibly condescending) and everybody needs to take some time out to become informed about what the current state of healthcare in the USA is, and also what really goes on elsewhere in the world (note - radio and tv talking heads with anecdotal stories do not provide any useful information about Canada, for example).
Oops, I just noticed that my soapbox hit the roof...Better get down off it now.

Usually when I send these types of replies, I never get a response, which is a shame, since I would like to understand the reaction. However, I am getting very weary of hearing and reading misinformation, cherry-picked outlier examples, and other forms of BS being deployed to support an ideological perspective that Government Healthcare Involvement Is Bad. Most of the posturing in this area is intellectually risible, it would not have survived 15 minutes in my high school debating society, and it should not be allowed to survive scrutiny today.
As a follow-up, I found this diary on DailyKos today that explains some of the key concepts that do not exist in the Canadian healthcare system...

In the Financial Times I found this article by Ben Funnell. He begins by laying out his stark hypothesis:

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

It's a very good article. His conclusion, while sounding all too simple, is inarguable:

...we need a new political consensus, one aimed at reducing overall debt levels while reducing inequality by encouraging education, entrepreneurship and investment in innovation.

In 2004, off-duty police officers in Milwaukee engaged in what can only be described as totally psychopathic behaviour when they beat up a bi-racial man at a house-warming party.
The most amazing thing about the whole affair was not that the police force attempted to cover up the incident (sadly, that is exactly what I would have expected a quasi-military body dominated by authoritarians to do), but that the cover-up almost made it through the criminal justice system. It took a civil trial for the extent of the police cover-up to be revealed.
The good news is that a number of officers involved in the incident are now serving long jail terms. The bad news is that Frank Jude is permanently physically and emotionally scarred. As far as I can tell, he has not received a dime in damages for his suffering. There is also no evidence that the Milwaukee Police Department has really made any institutional changes to prevent (a) hiring borderline pyschos as police officers and (b) improving monitoring to prevent abuses and cover-ups like the one seen here.
The case, distressing though it is, does bring to light one of the downsides of public and electoral attitudes to law enforcement. In most industrialized countries, police officers are paid no more than average salaries. This for a job where they are in many places, quite literally in the line of fire. They could go out on a patrol and not come back. This is a quasi-military organization in that respect. Unsurprisingly, military disciplines such as closing ranks, mutual loyalty etc. will trump logical behaviour.
The bigger underlying challenge, however, is that paying police forces poorly is a very dumb strategy. For a start, it makes police highly vulnerable to corruption. A poorly-paid officer with a family to support cannot help but be tempted by sums of money waved under his nose by criminals in return for some variant on "look the other way". Additionally, poor pay is unlikely to attract high-quality recruits. Police forces therefore tend to be dominated by recruits with lower educational attainment, and a correspondingly greater propensity towards emotional, prejudiced or racist attitudes, and (as we saw above) psychopathic behaviour. Add all of these factors together and you have a major institutional problem across the western world.
The bad news is that we are not going to make much headway on solving the issues until we stop paying police officers peanuts, and instead reward them properly for dealing with the nasties and crazies, and also putting their lives literally on the line during an average work week. While the behaviour of the officers in the above story was appalling, and the response of the police department was typically head-in-the-ass, this is not out of the ordinary, and it will continue to be the norm until we significantly improve the pay of police forces. You can't have good-quality anything on the cheap, and law enforcement is always supposed to be at or near the top of the careabouts of electors, so why are we surprised when we get bad behaviour from people who are paid poorly and then exposed to criminals?
This is so blindingly obvious that I should not have to even be writing about it...

As outlined in this article, which shows how excessive reliance was placed on evidence supposedly uncovered by a police dog, and how the various actors in the story on the prosecution side are all closing ranks and engaging in BS, evasion and other dysfunctional behaviours.
For a beautiful summary of what the proponents of the system would probably say if corned on this, read this comment here.
This is a mind-bogglingly frightening and unnerving story, but if you read the section on the criminal justice system in the book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by ME), the behavioural pathology at work here is easy to understand. They point out in the book that this sort of misconduct in Florida is not new:

The response of prosecutors in Florida is typical. After 130 people had been freed by DNA testing the space of 15 years, prosecutors decided that they would respond by mounting a vigorous challenge to similar new cases. Wilton Dredge had to sue the state to have the evidence in his case re-tested, over the fierce objections of prosecutors who said that the state's interest in finality and the victim's feelings should supersede concerns about Drudge's possible innocence. Drudge was finally exonerated and released.

As the book points out:

...American law enforcement remains steeped in its traditions, including adherence to the Reid Technique and similar procedures, maintaining a "near absolute denial" that these techniques can and do produce fake confessions and wrongful convictions.

Shorter summary: stories such as this one show that the American law enforcement system has major weaknesses and challenges in its ability to objectively investigate and prosecute crimes. This is quite apart from the fairly mind-boggling statistic that the USA has the highest documented rate of per capita incarceration of any country in the world, which suggests either a country riddled with crime (which I do not see) or an extreme willingness to lock people up. Based on dumb-ass legislation such as the "three strikes" rule, I think that there is a significant incidence of the latter mindset, but stories like this one also lead me to conclude that there are very significant failings in the prosecutorial side of the system, about which all of the actors in the system are in denial.

...in addition to changing the title, I am sure that he would have mentioned Photoshop as a tool used by regimes to manipulate visual images...

I was going to quote from this article, but it stands on its own and is so amazing that you need to read it (it's a short article). My initial reaction and my considered reaction are one and the same = that this is one of the most egregious examples of abuse of the legal system by prosecutors that I have ever read about. This is all in the service of a fundamentally impossible task - the attempt to seal the land borders between the USA and Mexico (and possibly Canada), which in the case of the USA-Mexico border is 1933 miles in length.
Any solution to illegal immigration that is based on a border fence or barrier is fundamentally flawed from a construction maintenance and logistical viewpoint. A permanent durable barrier would make the Great Wall Of China look like a small weekend engineering project. Perhaps the secret plan is to resurrect the post-World War II public works side of the Army Corps of Engineers?

When a society allows deeply dysfunctional individuals to conflate abortion with murder, without sufficient pushback from educated electors and opinion-formers who ought to be awake and alert, instead of mentally narcoleptic, this is the eventual result.
Let us not beat around the bush here. This, folks, is terrorism. I demand that the full weight of anti-terrorism laws in the USA be deployed to find the killers, bring them to justice, and marginalize and discredit the killer's supporters. They are nothing more than amoral, twisted, murdering jerks, and their support groups need to put away their fake apologies and Shut The Fuck Up (yes, Operation Rescue, I was referring to you, you dehumanizing bunch of scumbags).
UPDATE - The police have arrested a suspect, and, based on this article, it seems that the suspect was a disaster waiting to happen. Now, of course, we have a bunch of people who met him and became acquainted with him popping up saying stuff like "he was weird, wacky and had an obsession with abortion". All very interesting to know, but why was this guy allowed to graduate to terrorism? This is all somewhat reminiscent of Michael Ryan, and Timothy McVeigh.
Worse still is that there is a large body of evidence, in the form of threats and illegal behaviour (right up until the present day) towards abortion clinics and medical professionals. U.S. law enforcement has been wilfully and consistently ignoring these incidents and law enforcement issues for a long time. Any law enforcement official who expresses surprise at what has just happened is wilfully obtuse and deceitful, stupid, or both.
PZ Myers has a pretty good posting summarizing some thoughts about this disgraceful event:

In many ways, though, Roeder's religiosity is going to be a distraction. It simply doesn't matter, and the strongest conclusion we can draw from it is that religion fails to provide a reasonable framework for morality, since it is so easily and regularly subverted to rationalize evil. Focus instead on the root of the problem: Roeder was an amoral, obsessed nut who found support for his delusions among a particularly ugly American subculture. Gods don't matter. And when you think gods do, you lose sight of the truth: other people matter.

UPDATE 2 - David Neiwert, who has extensively studied domestic hate groups, weighs in with his thoughts on the Tiller murder.
UPDATE 3 - Jeffrey Feldman explains in this article how authoritarian fascists have succeeded in their attempts to frame abortion as murder. As he explains:

Dr. George Tiller was killed in his church because the right-wing has built a political movement around a violent idea: that America has been transformed by liberals into a culture that "murders" babies.
Like a giant river supported by millions of tiny underground streams, this movement is supported by everyone who defines those with whom they disagree on abortion policy as supporters of "murder."

As Feldman points out, the whole framing process has been perniciously supported and enabled, not only by dysfunctional politicians, but also by the media:

In political debates, right-wing voices almost always use certain controversial procedures to define abortion as "murder," but even when the subject moves beyond those procedures they continue to use "murder" to describe all other aspects of abortion. The phrase "baby murderer," then becomes short-hand for referring to "liberals" in other contexts.
This right-wing rhetorical strategy is used so often, people barely give it any notice anymore. Calling people "murderers" and "baby killers" has become a normal part of U.S. media. Guests on TV and radio shows who routinely accuse their debate opponents of supporting or condoning "murder" are invited back time and time again to repeat the accusation.

As Feldman concludes:

No matter how many or how few late term abortions are performed, so long as the right-wing anti-abortion movement continues to fold dissent into an ever-expanding definition of "murder," then the right-wing will continue to give rise to activists who kill doctors.

All of which begs the question: how long do we have to listen to scumbag bullies on radio and TV describing liberal supporters of reproductive rights as "baby-killers" and "murderers" before somebody in law enforcement decides that they might be inciting violence? Do we have to wait until a talk show host himself engages in violent behaviour before making this connection? Am I the the only person in the world who has noticed that the standard approach of authoritarian scumbags the world over, when faced with dissent, is to shout it down, and if that does not look like it is working, to threaten people with violence and other nasty personal consequences?
Wake up folks. The USA has a deadly undercurrent of acceptance of intolerance that is dangerously close to being out of control. There appears to be insufficient willingness on the part of a majority of the population to slap down, marginalize and ostracise offensive, authoritarian jerks.
Which brings us back to where we came in. Shooting an unarmed doctor in a crowded church in furtherance of a warped, murderous pathology is not merely murder. It is quite clearly a terrorist act, and needs to be treated as such. If animal rights protesters can be pursued by US and UK law enforcement using anti-terrorism laws, why are these laws not being deployed against the far more serious events that just occurred in Kansas?

When I was at high school in the UK, our house used to get visited regularly by religious sects. Most commonly it was the Jehova's Witnesses, who were very active locally. The Jehova's Witnesses clearly thought it was OK to drag their children along on these visits - on more than one occasion I would open the door and they would be standing there, children in tow (usually children looking like they would rather be somewhere else, anywhere else but here).
I soon noticed the standard patterns to the Jehova's Witness spiel. They would wave a copy of their house magazine, the Watchtower, and try to interest me in this wonderful publication which was going to change my life. If I demurred, they would produce the Bible and start quote-mining. The book of Revelations was their favorite quote mine, hardly surprising since the whole premise of the Jehovah's witnesses is that when Armageddon occurs, they will be The Chosen Ones, and they seemed to like the impressive sounding numbers quoted in the King James version of the bible in that book, using them in much the same way that Sen. Joseph McCarthy produced his "hundreds of Communists" allegations out of nowhere in the early 1950's.
I soon developed (thanks to an idea from a classmate) a fairly effective way of terminating these unwelcome intrusions. After letting them waffle for a minute or two, I would hold up my hand and say something like "I'm sorry, but this is not of any help to me. I'm an atheist".
They would usually respond with a line like "what benefits do you get from being an atheist?". (not sure why they would ask that, presumably they were looking for something to latch on to and prove I could get more benefits from their wacky sect). This provided me with the perfect response:
"The main benefit I get is that I do not have to stand on doorsteps listening to people like you. Good day". And with that, I would close the door.
I did this three times, it worked every time. They would stand there looking puzzled, then wander off to the next house.
There are better responses..here is a good idea from the comments section of a posting on Pam's House Blend:

I always have a piece of paper and pencil handy by the door. I give it to them and tell them to write down their name and address (no not the address of your church, honeybunch, YOUR personal address) and I'll stop by at a time of MY choosing and insist on telling them my personal beliefs. If they're not home I'll be glad to talk at length with their spouse or kids. Seems they never want to do that.

I shall have to try this. So far I have not been doorstepped here in the USA. It will happen eventually. If I am in a good mood, I will try the Pams House Blend response. If I am not in a good mood, I may just tell them to get the hell off of my property...we shall see.

The authoritarian dimwits who seem to constitute an unhealthy proportion of the conservative base in the USA have gotten themselves all worked up into a frenzy (as usual, aided and abetted by the mainstream media) over a remark by President Obama that one of the qualities he may seek in a future Supreme Court nominee is empathy. They seem to believe that empathy is a Really Bad Thing in a judge - why, it might make the judge sympathetic to one of the parties in a case! They also seem to be of the opinion that empathy is a codeword for what they term "judicial activism", which, based on my attempting to debate the phrase with conservatives, seems to itself be a codeword roughly translated as "judges who make decisions that I don't like".
The trouble with these arguments (as ever) is that they are simplistic, and fall into the trap of a false dichotomy. Where do we begin? How about reminding ourselves of arguments put forward in favour of the nomination of current Supreme Court justices who are generally regarded as conservative. Like Clarence Thomas. As this posting by Susan Bandes points out:

Judicial nominees and their supporters routinely assure Congress that they both intend to uphold the rule of law and are capable of empathy for those less fortunate. Clarence Thomas's controversial nomination to the Supreme Court got a crucial boost when liberal judge Guido Calabresi wrote that Thomas understands "what discrimination really means" and knows "the deep needs of the poor and especially poor blacks." Sen. Danforth (R-Mo.) added his own assurances that Thomas's heart would be with "the ordinary folk" if he were on the Supreme Court. In his confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito sought to reassure those concerned about his capacity to empathize with workers and the poor by describing his Italian-immigrant father and his own upbringing in "an unpretentious, down to earth community."

So, there is nothing new in making empathy a central feature of arguments in favour of judicial nominations to America's highest court.
Another aspect of the hand-wringing about empathy is that empathy is a key diagnostic characteristic for good socialization. A defining characteristic of sociopaths, for example, is their general lack of empathy and bonding with other humans. Arguing against the desirability of empathy takes you down a dangerous road. Are you really in favour of appointing a sociopath to the highest court in the land? Is this really a good idea. Of course, from my amateur viewpoint, it seems to me that a number of the leading figures in the GOP's recent past and present seem to exhibit some of the characteristics of sociopaths. The snarling, dismissive, black-and-white worldview of Dick Cheney and the narcissistic self-centered personal life of Newt Gingrich are not stellar advertisements for lack of empathy.
I therefore have tentatively concluded that the objection to "empathy" is yet another example of coded language, with "empathy" replacing "judicial activism" as another rallying cry for reflexive opponents of President Obama. Of course, it would be nice if those opponents stopped trying to rally around illogical, intellectually defective nonsense like this, but we are talking about the modern USA, where the ability to construct a cogent argument is currently taking second place (at least in the mass media) to fear-mongering, the endemic use of logical fallacies, and general bloviation and hand-waving.

Right now I am getting pissed with President Obama...he has only been in office 100 or so days, and now he is trying to prevent the release of photos which apparently will show detainees being tortured by U.S. military and or/intelligence department personnel.
The fact that torture has occurred does not seem to me to be in dispute, especially when the proponents of and apologists for torture seem to be expending a lot of rhetorical and argumentation energy on advancing the hypothesis that "torture works". If there was any doubt about the reality of past torture, they would still be clinging to the polite (prior) fiction of "we do not torture".
Obama's attempt to prevent the publication of the photos is supported by reasons that, as Lawyers Guns and Money explains, do not even begin to pass any test of logical argument. In short, the justification is flimsy bordering on BS. We also need to remember that this is a legal argument advanced by the Obama Administration to a circuit judge who may or may not be impressed enough by the argument to rule in favour of it. The judge might well decide that the argument is insufficiently compelling, and permit publication of the pictures.
This, of course, may be the outcome that the Obama Administration knows is inevitable; they may simply be going through the motions of objecting to publication so that they can turn round to the military and the intelligence communities and say "we tried...". However, given other evidence of backsliding on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Obama team is meeting my worst expectations of a team that, once granted governance power, is seeking to abuse that power the same way that its predecessor abused power. Not a good sign.

A rather disturbing story, from Ed Brayton's blog at ScienceBlogs:

A formerly anonymous blogger who criticized his prominent Southern Baptist pastor has sued police and state prosecutors for revealing his identify to the church even though an investigation showed he had done nothing illegal.

The blogger's blog is here, with updates on the legal action.
As Ed says, I hope he wins and wins big. This sort of covert investigation under the guise of a "criminal investigation" is nothing more than an invasion of privacy, and needs to be clobbered by the justice system, hopefully in a way that humiliates all of the scoundrels who took part in it.

I remember a few years ago, when the GOP still controlled the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives, a prevailing meme that was always used by Republicans when talking about their opponents was "angry liberals". Seemingly, all opponents were vicious, angry, twisted, warped liberals, and since in authoritarian circles, "liberal" is an all-purpose smear, the inclusion of that word alone would be enough to (as they see it) end the conversation.
Now, in 2009, the GOP finds itself in the minority in both national houses of representation, and the President is a Democrat. Is the GOP behaving graciously in opposition? Based on what I am reading about, it would seem that the answer is No. GOP-sympathetic radio and TV hosts are ranting about all manner of perceived indignities, elected representatives are bloviating about "tea parties" and "fascism". And, not to be outdone, the leader of the RedState website has now lowered the bar further. Describing the soon-retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter as a "goat fucking child molester" not only sets a lower standard for others to aim at (or below), it also seems to me to amply fit the definition of an "angry authoritarian".
Of course, I would be remiss if I did not also observe that it seems like the writings of a classless, moronic little shit...but I hate to have to re-state the obvious.

This article by Glenn Greeenwald is a masterpiece (note for the humor-impaired; the article makes extensive use of both irony and sarcasm...). It is good to see mendacious, duplicitous elected representatives being impaled on the consequences of their own contradictions and hypocrisies...like Rep. Jane Harman. It seems that her interview on NPR has not helped her either - but she apparently hasn't got a bloody clue about the law all of a sudden. See Amnesia.
On a related topic...there is a new reference frame being pushed into the public domain by frightened and embarrassed groups in and around the intelligence and surveillance divisions of government. Apparently, programs are now either "legal" or "extra-legal". If you want an excellent example of Orwellian language, here it is in 4 short syllables. It reads like some sort of advertising slogan ("New Improved Extra Legal! Buy it now!").
When are the brave media folk on radio and TV going to ask the blindingly obvious question "Er, is "extra-legal" not simply a bullshit euphemism for illegal?"
UPDATE - Glenn Greenwald goes back on the offensive against the mind-bogglingly hypocritical bloviations from Rep. Jane Harman at a recent APAIC meeting, where she vented against illegal wiretapping. It certainly appears that, as far as Rep. Harman is concerned, wiretapping is acceptable as a national security assurance tactic as long as it is The Other Guy who is being wiretapped...

As those of you who live in my home state may know, the Texas Board of Education has been under pressure from pro-Creationism members and from external organizations to water down the teaching of Evolution in the science curriculum in Texas. This attempt to completely subvert the integrity of science education in Texas has been going on for years, aided by an electorate that seems incapable of critical thinking when it comes to evaluating the merits of candidates for positions on the board (wake up people!).
This posting from Digby enumerates the extremely negligible qualifications of Don Patton, one of the opponents of the teaching of Evolution as part of the education process in Texas, who testified at recent board hearings on science teaching.
Based on my evaluation of his claimed qualifications, if he can call himself "Dr", then I ought to start claiming myself as a Professor. You see, unlike Mr. Patton, I actually have a degree in Geology, from the University of Manchester (1976).
Sadly, like many dangerous demagogues of the past, Patton does appear to be able to speak superficially plausible nonsense in a resonant, well-modulated voice. His opponents may lack in bombast, but as this posting from P.Z. Myers makes clear, opposition to his brand of unscientific religious nonsense spans most of the spectrum of academia, including (in this case) historians. The contempt of these people for the entire education process appears to know no limits.
In a related set of wackiness, the Insitute of Creation Research, whom Mr. Patton was representing in his appearance before the Texas board, has recently filed a complaint against the Texas Higher Education Co-Ordination Board in federal court for an injunction requiring the THECB to issue the Certificate of Authority and permit ICR to issue Master of Science degrees in science education. This follows the THECB rejection of their 2008 request to permit the ICR to offer a Master’s degree in science education in Texas.
This blog posting by a practising lawyer outlines the numerous ways in which this complaint is a waste of dead tree products and court system bandwidth.
The entire complaint seems to me to be another attempt to create publicity and engage in some martyrdom, with the education and the court systems ultimately being pointed to as the nasty villians.
This sort of devious, intellectually dishonest behaviour from supporters of Creationism is likely to continue until electors start to apply much more rigorous thinking and evaluation processes to education board candidates in Texas. Voting for candidates who, by a process of defective reasoning, seek to elevate the teaching of Creationism to the level of science may make people feel more virtuous (I guess), but if continued, the election of backward-looking, unthinking individuals to positions of power in the U.S. education system will undermine the system over time to the point where it ceases to have any credibility, either inside the U.S.A. or in the rest of the world. The obsession with Creationism is regarded in Europe was a weird, illogical and highly suspect behaviour pattern peculiar to the U.S.A. (Even the Roman Catholic Church, that most hierarchical and conservative of organizations, formally accepted Evolution as an explanation for the development of intelligent life on Earth years ago.)

...explaining why the Nuremburg Defense ("I was only obeying orders") was ruled irrelevant at the time, and why it is still irrelevant as a defense to charges of illegal activity by government and military employees.
The key part of the argument is contained in this neat summary:

...people who act on behalf of the government must be assured that unless they exercise some basic moral and legal common sense reasoning, then they will be held accountable for their actions and prosecuted for violating any laws — most especially obvious laws which any half-conscious adult should have noticed they were breaking.
Government employees and independent contractors are not automatons whom we simply wind up and aim in some desired direction; they are morally responsible adults who must be held morally and legally responsible for actions they choose to take. They have a choice to not take action they suspect may be legally questionable or which appear to be morally dubious. Granted, there are grey areas where it's not always obvious what is legal and what is illegal. I'd like to think that those engaged in actively administering criminal treatments like waterboarding would have noticed that they were breaking the law, but I could accept that not every situation was quite so clear. Is that a reason to withhold prosecution? Absolutely not.

While I was on vacation in the Bahamas, it seems that Rick Perry, our Governor, hinted that Texas could always secede from the Union if it did not like the political direction out of Washington. He apparently made the comments in Austin at one of several "tea parties".
Don't get me started on the irredeemable stupidity behind the tea party concept - the Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxation without representation, while America was a disenfranchised colony of Great Britain. The current "tea parties" are nothing more than publicity stunts by a bunch of pissed voters who have taxation with representation - just not the representation that they voted for. In short, this is nothing more than childish petulance from sore losers.
It seems that Perry has since been heard trying to walk back from his original comments...oops, sorry, I meant he has been clarifying his comments, but in the meantime, his comments have ignited a predictable storm of comment. Political luminaries such as Ron Paul (ho-hum) and Tom DeLay (somebody save us from this fuckwit) have weighed in with their own comments.
I first encountered some Texas secessionists in the UseNet days, when a discussion broke out in a UseNet group about whether Texas could secede. I got myself into a vigorous, but ultimately frustrating debate with one of them, when I pointed out that the U.S. Constitution has no defined process for secession, for Texas or for any other state. It does not forbid secession, but there is no process defined anywhere for how a state can secede. The secessionist that I was arguing with waved aside this issue with a bland "it does not prohibit secession so we can secede if we want to", but totally failed to answer the obvious question "how would you do this?". He also seemed to be unwilling to address any of the practical issues of secession, such as what pro-rated percentage of the US National Debt should be assumed by Texas when it secedes. This, by the way, was one of the issues that choked off the last serious attempt by Quebec to secede from Canada in the mid-1990's, when the then-PM Brian Mulroney told the Parti Quebecois that Quebec would have to assume a pro-rata share of the Canadian national debt if it succeeded. If you want to leave the club, you have to settle your bar bills...if the other states decide to apportion the debt amount on the basis of land area, then Texas is bankrupt from day 1.
The practical reality is that Texas is not seceding from the Union any time soon, and any public figure who suggests that it is even a possibility is engaging in empty bloviation of the most facile kind, bordering on stupid.

...which tries to explain the phenomenon that simplistic, sometimes idiotic arguments made by people with limited knowledge of a subject can overwhelm more complete arguments that require both detail knowledge and time for explanation. This is what I have referred to as "the curse of the soundbite", where a glib, often stupid 30 second summary of a complex issue ends up substituting for any substantive summary of the issue.

In World Magazine online, Cal Thomas has a commentary on the Iowa Supreme Court decision. Included among the standard worried hand-waving along the lines of "if they eliminate man-woman marriages, what are the new rules?" (has nobody in the Christian sphere ever understood the concept of informed consent?) is this gem:

To those on the political and religious right who are intent on continuing the battle to preserve “traditional marriage” in a nation that is rapidly discarding its traditions, I would ask this question: What poses a greater threat to our remaining moral underpinnings? Is it two homosexuals living together, or is it the number of heterosexuals who are divorcing and the increasing number of children born to unmarried women, now at nearly 40 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?

Ding! We have a Winner! As numerous commentators have pointed out in the past, the real threat (in numerical terms) to marriage is not single-sex couples getting married, it is heterosexual couples divorcing. Anybody who does not realize this is either arguing from a position of bigotry or does not understand simple math (or both).
And Thomas then hits the nail on the head again in the next paragraph:

Most of those who are disturbed about same-sex marriage are not as exercised about preserving heterosexual marriage. That’s because it doesn’t raise money and won’t get them on TV. Some preachers would rather demonize gays than oppose heterosexuals who violate their vows by divorcing, often causing harm to their children. That’s because so many in their congregations have been divorced and preaching against divorce might cause some to leave and take their contributions with them.

Another home run! Even a cursory view of Judeo-Christian religious activity here in Dallas would confirm that it relies heavily on money (and plenty of it). You don't get to erect the sort of massive churches all over the place that are visible on even a short drive, without large piles of money. Especially when a lot of the money seems to be used to maintain elaborate corporate operations and lavish lifestyles and spending by church leaders...
Churches are big business here, they need lots of money to keep going, and therefore rely heavily on donations from wealthy church-goers. It is very cost-effective to rail from the pulpit about "heathen homosexuals" perverting the institution of marriage - there are unlikely to be any gay donors in the audience to offend, and the threat of "the gays" might actually increase donations. OTOH, reminding those in attendance of their solemn duty to remain married to their (presumably heterosexual) spouses risks offending those in attendance who just traded their last spouse in for the latest model...

An explanation of the two different types of banking...and how/why the banking system is currently in disarray, from a banker based in Paris.
The Tax Foundation publishes a lot of interesting data on taxation in the USA. This table from its web site shows the ration of Federal taxes paid to Federal dollars obtained by the States in the Union.
Calculated Risk is an interesting blog dealing with economics and finance. Amongst its current postings is a pointer to the fact that both Chrysler and GM are coming back for yet more money (who would have guessed? No surprise to me, having watched the slow death of the UK-owned volume car industry in the 1980's for reasons that are partly similar to the issues here).
Doctor Housing Bubble discusses and reports on property market issues, both from a practical dollars-and-cents perspective, and from a wider societal perspective. The Housing Bubble Blog provides a round-up of news on the housing market from around the country by pointing to and summarizing articles and news about housing markets. As you might expect, not much of the news is good right now. Neither blog is afflicted with housing market cheerleading; the last thing I need right now is a realtor attempting to convince me that we have reached bottom in the housing market...
And back in the UK...Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's expenses claim included adult films viewed by her husband...WHHHOOOOPS...

Mike Doogan is a Democratic State Representative in Alaska. A couple of days ago, for reasons which remain unclear, he decided to reveal the name of the author of the blog Mudflats, which deals with Alaska politics and governance. The author operates the blog under a pseudonym.
Doogan chose to "out" the blogger without permission, using a constituent newsletter presumably created using state resources.
Doogan's response to complaints about this action has been dismissive at best, and bullyingly obnoxious at worst.
Doogan has provided no cogent explanation for why he stripped away the author's privacy in this fashion. His action is similar to other such actions taken in the past, usually by authoritarian commentators and journalists, who seem to operate on the principle that one's opponents do not have any privacy rights.
This is nothing more than bullying and threatening behaviour designed to induce fear. It is beneath contempt, and for this reason I have no hesitation in making Mike Doogan my Jerk Of The Week for this action. And Mike, if you're reading this, by all means put me on your "list". I shall accept it as a badge of honor, and when the time comes for your re-election I will donate to your primary opponents. You're a mean-spirited bully, and you need to be removed from elected office before you poison the governance process any further.

While contemplating a lot of things following a spat with a friend online this morning (outcome uncertain), I went off to see if I could find some cogent discussions or elaborations on the nature of patriotism.
Growing up in the UK, I personally observed a positive correlation between claimed patriotism and authoritarianism, often accompanied by a militaristic component. The British National Party, a motley collection of authoritarian and racist scumbags, usually claimed to be patriots, railed against other politicians for conniving in the decay of the UK, and wrapped themselves in the Union Jack. They were not a pleasant or positively convincing collection of people. I also noticed the positive correlation between mob violence (often originating with soccer supporters) and the frequency with which those violent people wore flag grab such as t-shirts and hats. I saw those types of people attempting to demolish bars in my home town as an adolescent.
I thus have a background that has left me extremely wary of any overt claims of "patriotism", and especially wary of any group of people who wave a nation's flag as they seek to assert their patriotism. By extension, I am also wary of people who denigrate other people for being "unpatriotic" either because they refuse to uncritically support their country, or because they do not respect the flag. In the 1970's I saw numerous street demonstrations in the UK where angry demonstrators would burn the Union Jack as a way of demonstrating their dislike for the UK or its policies. Aside from a small community of mostly retired military people, there were few people who were incensed with these displays, and there was no attempt made to ban flag-burning.
I was dismayed by the atmosphere that descended in the USA after 9/11. It seemed that many people were unable or unwilling to understand the difference between dissent and disloyalty. I was personally invited to leave the country during a discussion by a work colleague (he seemed to have temporarily forgotten the irony that he was married to a German) because I disagreed with his worldview. I also had at least 2 other people stop speaking to me because I disagreed with their ideas about how to respond to 9/11. Included in this population was a work colleague who asserted that the Constitution only applied to citizens, and when I produced my copy of the Constitution and asked him to find the exclusion, responded by saying "well it should exclude non-citizens", which essentially terminated the discussion.
All of those incidents, plus the more recent incident, left me wondering "what is patriotism, what types of patriotism are there, and what does research tell us about the worldviews and pathologies underlining patriotism?"
One interesting facet of patriotism as a concept is that there is very little useful empirical research on it. You can't find much in the way of interesting reading on patriotism as a concept. Views of patriotism tend to occupy a dichotomy between the worldview that Patriotism is a good thing (and there should be a lot more of it) and the worldview that (to recycle an old quote) Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
I did find this blog posting, that examined research and posits that there are two basic types of patriotism:

...divide patriotism into two main types: blind and constructive patriotism, and these two types seem to line up almost perfectly with the situation described in the opening paragraph. In this paragraph, they describe the two types:
[B]lind patriotism [is] a rigid and inflexible attachment to country, characterized by unquestioning postitive evaluation, staunch allegiance, and intolerance of criticsm. These factors comprise core elements of Kelman's "sentimental attachment" to country. In contrast, constructive patriotism refers to an an attachment to country characterized by "critical loyalty, questioning and criticism of current group practices that are driven by a desire for positive change". Both orientations are "patriotic" in the core sense of positive identficiation with feelings of affective attachment to country. However, the blind patriot views national criticism and dissent as inherently disloyal, whereas the constructive patriot does not. Instead, the constructive patriot may criticize and even actively oppose the nation's actions because he or she believes they violate fundamental percepts or are contrary to long-term national interests.

Having read the blog posting, I think I am now able to distinguish the pathologies that I have encountered. It seems that some of my post-9/11 encounters were with blind patriots, or at least, people who were behaving in that fashion at the time.
What the articles fail to make clear is how situational the two types of patriotism might be, and the extent to which people can morph their views between the two types. For example, is it possible that a lot of constructive patriots were converted to blind patriots by the shock and horror of 9/11? And if so, have some (or most) of them now reverted to constructive patriotism?
As an adolescent victim of bullying, I find that a lot of the time, blind patriots appear to me as intolerant bullies, which sensitizes me to their presence and arguments. Quite simply, I will not tolerate any behaviour that I construe as bullying. Remarks like "if you don't agree you need to leave the country" are not worthwhile arguments, they are merely the verbal outputs of a bullying pathology that is going to get short shrift from me. When I heard a variant of this argument from my work colleague in 2001, I ended the conversation and did not spend any more time talking to him. Bullies deserve nothing more than contempt from those that they attempt to bully.

As we watch the train-wreck that is the AIG bonus mess continue to unfold, it is worth while remembering that none of what we are witnessing is really new, at least in terms of human behaviour. Not too many years ago, we watched the implosion of Enron, a corporation that, with hindsight, was dominated by a the mindset so appropriately dubbed "Master Of The Universe" by Tom Wolfe in his book "The Bonfire Of The Vanities", which is still one of the great tales of greed, hubris and excess (Gordon Gecko's infamous "Greed is good" speech in the movie "Wall Street" could have been lifted entirely from "Bonfire Of The Vanities").
This interesting article was written a few years ago on the subject of Enron and other related corporate malfeasances of the time.The messages in the article are just as relevant to the AIG fiasco. Here is the most directly applicable one (which is also the most chilling):

The "few rotten apples" theory ignores the fact that affairs like Enron and WorldCom were not isolated incidents—nor were they conducted conspiratorially and surreptitiously. What is now conveniently labeled "misconduct" was an open secret. Information — albeit often relegated to footnotes — was available. The charismatic malignant narcissists who headed these corporations were cheered on by investors — small and institutional alike. Their grandiose fantasies were construed as visionary. Their sense of entitlement—never commensurate with their actual achievements — was tolerated forgivingly. Their blatant exploitation of co-workers and stakeholders was part of the ethos of the virile Anglo-Saxon, natural selection, can-do, dare-do version of capitalism. Everyone colluded in this mass psychosis. There are no victims here—only scapegoats.

UPDATE - Here is another interesting article about Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

...was a study eagerly cited to me by a work colleague who argued that the media in the USA has a left-wing or liberal bias. I did try to point out to him that any argument based on "liberal" vs. "conservative" or "left-wing' vs. "right-wing" is obsolete; the right discussion topic is libertarianism vs. authoritarianism. I didn't get very far with that part of the debate.
I read the UCLA study that he cited, and found it to be no different in may respects to several other studies that I have read in the past, all of which claimed to demonstrate some degree of bias within the media. Since I consider the real issue in media reporting to be truth and full coverage of issues, rather than bias, I find most of these studies to be at best peripheral and at worst totally irrelevant to the current reality that most mainstream media outlets in the USA are a waste of human endeavour.
I just found this dissection of the UCLA study in Media Matters. The most important part of this dissection to me was the demonstration of the extent to which the authors either overlooked or ignored a large amount of preceding academic research on the topic.
Whenever I see people who represent themselves as scholars or experts ignoring most of the previous endeavours in their field, I tend to become rather skeptical of their credibility. After all, would you place much faith in the diagnosis of a doctor if during his discussion with you he admitted "I don't read most medical textbooks and articles"?

By commenter Justcorbly, who does a good job of explaining why the media is a terrible forum for any form of balanced discussion:

The way most of the media portrays balance is the way those car magazines I read as a kid reviewed new models: They pair them off in phony combat with some other brand. Camaro vs. Firebird! Corvette versus 911!.
It's the same way PC Magazine would review things like printers in its special annual "All The Printers In The World" issue (just aother 450-page magazine, with printer companies placing ads mysteriously close to the reviews of their products). Epson versus Lexmark! Canon versus Brother!
It was, and is, an effort to frame almost every story as a zero-sum battle to the death. That's what drives much of media, not a compulsion to deliver balance.

When I first arrived in Dallas in 1994 on a 1 year overseas assignment from the UK, it did not take me long to discover that the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) was the sort of organization that Will Rogers would have loved to report on. For examples of incompetence, malfeasance and just plain awful governance, DISD truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
Not too long ago, DISD "discovered" that it had a budget shortfall of at least $60m, and possibly as high as $80m. The fact that nobody seemed to be able to provide a consistent number for the shortfall, or explain how the shortfall had occurred, ought to have been cause for the termination of at least some DISD officials. However, the N.O. Body syndrome appeared to eliminate accountability, and the DISD set about cutting left right and center to balance the books.
Now, courtesy of the Dallas Observer, we learn that on 21st November the DISD proposed to extend the term of DISD trustees from 3 to 4 years. This proposal would be extremely convenient, in that 3 trustees would be up for election early next year, and 2 of them happen to be supporters of the current superintendent, Michael Hinojosa.
The Dallas Observer article, in best Molly Ivins style, summarizes the proposal thusly:

The Dallas school board, in the throes of the worst fiscal crisis in the history of the district and growing voter unrest, this week will consider dealing with its political problems by suspending upcoming school board elections.
No, now, I told you. This is not a joke. This is not a bulletin from Zimbabwe. The Dallas school board at its November 20 meeting will vote on canceling school board elections due to take place next May.
In fact, it's a little worse than that. They don't just want to cancel the election. They want to do it without public debate.

Earlier this year, I kept reading conspiracy theory suggestions that President Bush was planning to cancel the 2008 Presidential Elections on some pretext...but it seems that DISD has boldly decided to actually implement a similar idea to perpetuate the terms of office of trustees, who, I would suggest, ought to be accepting at least some miniscule smidgeon of accountability for the unholy financial mess that the DISD has been mired in. They, as far as I can tell, voted to appoint the leaders and officers who were in charge when DISD suddenly "discovered" its budget shortfall.
This is not like a third world country. The DISD is operating right now as a third world country within a city. This sort of behaviour is just mind-bogglingly unbelieveable. It resembles the worst duplicity, anti-democratic actions and attitudes of Stalinist Russian. Josef Stalin would be laughing from his grave.
It might be worth noting that this sort of unbelievable behaviour is not exactly new in this part of Texas. Next door to DISD, the Wilmer-Hutchins ISD was shut down in 2005 by TEA after continued decline, poor academic performance, and accusations of corruption and malfeasance from all points of the compass. This 2004 article provides some insight into the mess.
UPDATE - It seems that the proposal was passed by a 7-2 majority at the school board meeting, with no serious debate, and in the teeth of clear public opposition.
This sort of egregiously anti-democratic behaviour is going to continue until electors toss all of the current DISD trustees from office. Until electors fire school boards and trustees for Stalinist nonsense like this, the bad behaviour and endemic stupidity and waste wihin the DISD will most likely continue.
Over to the electorate.
UPDATE 2 - Not to be outdone, the Lancaster ISD has now joined the North Texas School Board Malfeasance Contest, via the investigation of their superintendent for various alleged malfeasances. Examples:

...an outside investigator reported that Dr. Lewis used district funds to give employees interest-free loans, authorized payroll advances to himself and other employees and handed out cash prizes to employees.

If these allegations are true, and another superintendent is fired, I'm starting to wonder if there is something in the water in North Texas. Something that electors are drinking, which renders them consistently unable to stop voting idiots into positions of power on school boards. If you wanted to make a compelling case that local electors are not capable of making sound decisions on these aspects of local governance, you won't have to go far to find the evidence.
UPDATE 3 - The Lancaster ISD board has now fired the superintendent...
UPDATE 4 - The Lancaster ISD superintendent has now asked for a public hearing on his case...
UPDATE 5 - A settlement has been reached between Superintendent Lewis and the Lancaster ISD. He will work out his contract until July 2009 and then leave with a cash settlement.

From the UK blogger The Osterley Times comes this highly useful comparison between politics in the USA and the UK.
One of the more amazing memes that has become prevalent here (to my dismay, I have already heard it from at least 3 friends in the last 2 months), is that Barack Obama is a "socialist" or is going to introduce "socialism".
My response is usually to ask them to define "socialism", which often leads to confusion, since they usually got the term off of talk radio, and they have no idea what it means. Another possible response is to point out that in absolute political terms, calling Barack Obama socialist is so far off the mark as to be embarrassing. Most mainstream members of the Democratic Party would be regarded as highly conservative in European countries, including the UK, where Obama would feel right at home in the Conservative Party.
The main thrust of The Osterley Times is to point out that most of the memes and debating points being deployed by fringe commentators in the USA who are opposed to the Obama administration would not be taken seriously in the UK, because they would be regarded at best as irrelevant, and more likely would be dismissed as intellectually and morally bankrupt. To wit:

Bush, when asked about the criticism of waterboarding - which he refuses to see as torture, despite the fact that the US itself has prosecuted people for doing that very thing - asked, "Which attack would they rather not have stopped?" He actually acted as if this could be sold as a "red pen or blue pen" scenario where one has to choose between torture and attacks.
No British politician could dare sit on national TV and make that argument. But in the US, Bill O'Reilly can sit on national television and actually argue that people who oppose torture are "despicable".

As he neatly summarizes:

Every society has politicians who hold disgraceful positions on things like torture, abortion and gay rights; but I can think of no European country, indeed almost no country anywhere outside the Muslim world, where a political party who espoused such views could possibly hope to be taken seriously.

...that does a really good job of explaining how the current asset valuation bubble based on housing developed over time.

Despite all of the fury, light, heat and sound surrounding the McLaren spying affair and the involvement of former Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney, with the Italian legal system launching investigations, and threats of criminal charges against Stepney and McLaren employees, the investigations have apparently ended and the case will be settled via some McLaren personnel paying fines.
Any prosecution of Nigel Stepney risked embarrassment for Formula 1. Stepney was the Ferrari chief mechanic through the Schumacher years, and probably knows more than almost anybody else on the team what interesting, er, actions were taken by Ferrari in their interpretation of the F1 Technical Regulations. He had the potential to severely embarrass not only Ferrari, but F1 in general if he was to be cross-examined. Ditto Mike Coughlan, who Stepney was alleged to have funnelled information to concerning the design of the 2007 Ferrari.
The last thing F1 needed in an economic recession was more scandal, so it is no surprise to me that the case has been quietly settled.

Some of you may have noticed a controversy a couple of weeks ago when Michael Phelps admitted to smoking marijuana after a picture of him inhaling from a bong was published on the Internet. Phelps issued a grovelling apology, and has been banned from competitive swimming for 3 months.
This alternative ghost-written letter is IMHO the letter that Phelps should have written...

This article peripherally discusses a key indicator of whether a housing boom is unsustainable - the spread between rent values and mortgage values. The graph enclosed in the article is instructive...and confirms my suspicion that the housing market in many parts of the country has yet to hit bottom. I forecast no uptick until 2010.

There has been a whole heap of controversy in the last week or so about a change to the Terms Of Service for Facebook. The change would, as strictly read, give Facebook the rights to distribute or sell any user's content in perpetuity after they stop using Facebook.
Not surprisingly, this change has ignited a firestorm of commentary and comment, much of it unfavourable to Facebook. Some clarifications to the underlying reasoning behind the change were issued by Facebook and can be viewed here.
This controversy is a real one; however, the best rule that we can all operate by is the Pandora's Box rule, which I remember discussing with a lady friend of mine back in July 2007, who had been encouraged by some friends to set up a personal web site. My observation was that for all practical purposes, any content that you put on an Internet site that is not password-protected will be public domain, therefore you can expect that anybody can (and sometimes will) appropriate it and distribute it, usually without credit. So...if you were looking to include those pictures of you prancing around naked on a far-away beach...probably best to not do that, unless you want your work boss or censorious aunt to eventually find them. As one commenter noted:

I think a good rule of thumb is to just presume that anything you put on the internet is out there forever and ever regardless if you want it there or not. Follow that logic, and no TOS will catch you off guard.

UPDATE - Facebook has (for now) re-instated its prior Terms of Service. They are promising an overhaul of the entire Terms of Service soon. It appears that they were persuaded by the mostly negative feedback...

While we ponder this most loving of days, let's also take a small amount of time out to consider this delightful letter sent by Pastor Billy Ball of Faith Baptist Church, Primrose, Georgia to Pam Spaulding in 2007.
As one commenter on the blog remarked:

A lot of crayons in a week. I wonder if he still eats them.
Nice handwriting though. He's almost ready to start learning cursive.

A lawsuit has been filed in California's court system by lawyers representing people and corporations who donated money to the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in the November 2008 elections. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the publication of the names of donors to the campaign in favour of Proposition 8. The lawsuit is actually rather pointless, since the names of the donors are already in the public domain on the internet.
Terry Cosgrove in Huffington Post has an article on this lawsuit. He neatly sums up the intellectual and morally bankrupt reasoning behind the lawsuit:

Why does all of this sound so familiar? Perhaps because for more than 30 years, the anti-abortion activists on the right, many associated with the Catholic Knights of Columbus and Mormons (both conveniently oppose measures to prevent abortion and HIV), have been invading the right to privacy of millions of American women seeking medical care with physical violence, vandalism of personal property, harassing phone calls, emails, blacklisting, boycotts, etc. In other words, the law should protect anti-abortion and anti-gay activists from threats, boycotts and violence but these same people should be allowed to participate freely in threats, boycotts and violence against women seeking birth control and abortion. You can't even make this stuff up.

Another good point comes from a commenter in the attached discussion thread:

Frankly, why would anyone who is saving this country from a slippery slope of bestiality marriages and hate crime legislation against preachers be ashamed of their contribution? Shouldn't they be bragging about how they saved "traditional values?"

As a person who was bullied in high school, I understand exactly the pathology that is at work in the debate and campaign over Proposition 8. The supporters of Proposition 8 are nothing more than societal bullies seeking to impose their worldview on others. And, like most bullies, they shy away from any accountability for their actions. When the teachers at my school caught one of my fellow pupils trying to bully me one day, his defence was "I wasn't bullying him, I was merely teasing him". Even at the age of 13, that guy was already deveoping the reasoning ability to dodge accountability. The lawsuit by supporters of Proposition 8 is merely an adult manifestation of the same lack of willingness to be accountable for their actions. The bullies do not want to be forced to endure the same fate as their would-be victims. This is totally predictable given the underlying pathology of bullying. Most bullies are themselves frightened insecure people, hence their fear of being called on their actions. The lawsuit is without merit, and should be tossed, and the supporters of Proposition 8 should accept accountability for their actions. Anything less is merely allowing the practice of societal bullying to continue.

This article in Firedoglake highlights a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee asking for an investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an elected official who, by all accounts, has little respect for fundamental judicial concepts such as presumption of innocence and due process.
Arpaio's exploits have been highlighted for years by investigate journalists and several local newspapers, yet he consistently gets re-elected by the voters of Maricopa County - five times to be exact. This is therefore a "We The People" problem - Arpaio would not exist as a problem for the House Judicial Committee to investigate were he not returned to office by voters who should know better.

The website GetHuman.com, which lists major customer service organizations and how to get through their Voice Response front-ends and talk to a real live human...

A great musical voice has disappeared...

I have seen a number of amusing complaint letters over the years, but this one from an irate and pissed-off customer of the UK telecom company NTL is my favorite...I first found it on the Internet 5 years ago, lost it, and now I just found it again.
WARNING - Readers not familiar with English vernacular as spoken in the UK may require the translation of certain slang and naughty words...

...is discussed in this diary at DailyKos. The subject of the diary ostensibly revolves around yet another defensive pronouncement from former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez. However, the important definition and distinction is contained in this succinct couple of paragraphs:

...in order for the law to work, it must be just. It must be rational. It must treat famous men and ordinary ones, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the meek, the same. The rule of law exists when we live under a system of laws we believe to be just and cheerfully submit to them.
Legalism, on the other hand, is a gimmick. It dresses itself in the clothing of the law but it is arbitrary and capricious. Legalism misuses the language and majesty of the law to attempt to make legal what is illegal, moral what is immoral, and rational what is absurd. Legalism was the modus operandi of the entire Bush administration - from "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forest" legislation that was the height of Orwellian double-speak to the so-called Patriot Act and telecom immunity. Legalism is the facile and idiotic belief that "when the President does it, it's not illegal," and that all laws, all protections and rights of man, which good people have fought for, and bled for, and died for, can be sublimated to some almighty "Commander in Chief Power" that knows no limits or boundaries.
Legalism, in its most vicious and evil form, is the Nuremberg Laws.
Legalism is the basis for the defense of "just following orders."

Having defined carefully the difference between the two worldviews, the author then asks the now-rather obvious and devastating question about Gonzalez' latest attempt at post-hoc self-justification:

So when that mental midget, the affable torture enabler who made a mockery of this country's system of justice declares: "these activities ... They were authorized, they were supported by legal opinions at the Department of Justice," how is that any different from Adolf Eichmann claiming he did nothing wrong because "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from... my superiors"?

Of course, this is a classic example of a devastating argument that cannot, by it's nature, be reduced to a soundbite, and is therefore unlikely to be seen on network television any time soon...

A bunch of links for a change to Interesting Stuff.
I read an article this week in The New Yorker, "The Dystopians" by Ben McGrath (not available unline unless you are a subscriber), a thoughtful look at a number of opinion leaders who have been forecasting some sort of breakdown in the American Way Of Life for some time. It is difficult to write articles about this subject without dragging in all sorts of weirded-out backwoods survivalist nutcases and groups from the likes of rural Idaho, but McGrath focusses instead on thought leaders such as Dmitry Orlov, James Kunstler, Jim Sinclair and Nassim Taleb, who, coming from highly dissimilar backgrounds, all have developed thinking about the future of the USA.
Crooks and Liars has a pointer to a series of articles that explore the reality that Democratic governance has been more likely to yield economic growth, balanced budgets and prosperity in recent years in the USA than Republican governance. The "tax and spend" meme of the impact of Democratic Party policies which is always produced by GOP supporters is rooted in this myth, and it is high time that enough Americans started to see the meme for what is - a mostly dishonest fabrication. The fabrication also has roots in the "trickle down" hypothesis which was deployed by the GOP in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan, the idea being that if governments reduced taxes, the overall governmental model would be improved because overall revenues would still increase due to the liberating effects of removing taxation burdens from income producers. This certainly worked in the UK in the 1980's, but the crucial difference, which keeps being overlooked by trickle-down supporters, is that in the UK we had direct taxation rates for high earners that bordered on confiscation. The USA has never been a highly taxed country, despite what your whining work colleague might have you believe, so the conditions were not the same. As David Stockman discovered during his term as Ronald Reagan's budget director, when the GOP took office in 1980, instead of cutting government spending, they instead greatly increased it (largely via a massive increase in defense spending) while also reducing taxes. That the outcome was a massive federal budget deficit should have been obvious to anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of mathematics; however, the US electorate has been oblivious for decades to the shell game being run by politicians where they promise to cut taxes and still balance budgets. Until electorates wake up and start tossing politicians from office when they run such scams, the current economic mess in the USA will continue.
Meanwhile, I was reminded of the very prevalent American confusion about socialism this week in a conversation with a friend who opined that Barack Obama is a socialist. Coming from Europe, where the Democratic party would be seen in most countries as a rather conservative party, I find the proposition fairly ludicrous, lacking any supporting evidence or any semblance of a supporting argument, and it appears to be largely an origination from talk radio, which paints for it's listeners a simplistic world of false dichotomies, where the USA is a capitalist nirvana and the rest of the world is mostly either a fascist, communist or socialist wasteland. Kollapsnik on Dmitry Orlov's blog has a lengthy post deconstructing the whole area of warped thinking in the USA about "socialism" today.

The website of Dr. Sarah Mednick, who has accumulated research showing that most of the time it pays to nap rather than take stimulants...

...is that the root cause lies with the US electorate. "We the people" elected George W. Bush in 2000, and re-elected him in 2004. The results are with us today.
Barack Obama is not the solution to that underlying issue. I am quite sure that if Obama is percieved to have failed, the electorate will merely be seduced into electing another leader in 2012, and the whole sorry cycle of inadequate governance will continue.
As Oxdown notes:

It was our elected representatives who failed to take a single effective action to hold the regime accountable for its multiple, blatant crimes; it was our media who blessed these actions; and it was we who voted these same people back into office, including a new President and Vice President who helped sanction some of these abuses.

Until we (as an electorate) start voting different people into office at all levels of the political system, the issues that are undermining America's position in the world will continue to work against this country.