I know that this will want you to dig deep, and make a contribution to their plight in this Christmholiday season.
It’s getting so that journalists can no longer afford to live in New York. Maybe they should drive a bus instead. Given the quality of much of their output, many of them are sure overpaid for what they’re doing now.
Robert Reich in today’s Marketplace Morning Report (“Spies Like Us”) talks about how unchecked executive power is a concern for business. We can argue about whether Congress authorized any means necessary with its vaguely worded declaration of war. We can argue about whether the ends justify the means. But if the President can designate anyone an enemy combatant with no judicial check, that suspends habeus corpus. Holding people without charge is not supposed to happen in America especially not to American citizens on American soil.
If the President can tap anyone’s US-overseas calls without judicial review and use the evidence against them, that suspends the 4th amendment protections on unreasonable searches.
If the President can search my library book record, that nullifies the first amendment right to freedom of the press as surely as staking out people’s bedrooms nullifies their right to privacy.
Innocent until proven guilty is being whittled away as people like Walt Anderson are being held without bail based on their reading list.
Reading unclassified information is not illegal. A free press requires that anything that is legally published should be read without legal consequence.
I believe that authorities have overstepped here. There are antibodies society should create to check an executive or Congressional majority tinkering with the Constitution.
I propose that libraries be reorganized to hide reading lists from authorities. In particular, books should be checked out anonymously. The main business problem this causes is that the library doesn’t know who to send an overdue notice to. To solve this problem, readers should be allowed to pay a substantial deposit in cash to check out a book anonymously which would then be returned when the book is returned.
Let the Executive Branch go to Congress for money and get a warrant for staking out the library if it is so all-fired important to find out what we are reading.
So check the Executive. Check the wire. Check out the books without Big Brother looking over your shoulder.
I doubt if this is true, but if there’s anyone on earth who deserves to be beaten in detention, it’s surely Saddam Hussein.
Posting will likely be light this week, and next, due to deadlines and holiday activities.
NASA can now authorize up to ten million dollars for a prize without consulting Congress. The previous limit was a quarter of a million.
As his first Christmas behind bars approaches, serial space entrepreneur Walt Anderson is looking like a political prisoner. Michael Mealing has a Christmas card for him.
I build my own machines, and having had to deal with upgrading Dells from friends and relatives (and my work laptop as well, since that what the company that I’m working with insists on buying) would never, ever consider buying one.
But now Jane Galt, who has heretofore sung their praises, has finally learned her lesson as well. Not a pretty Christmas story (though I have to confess that my sympathy is not abundant, given my previous attitude toward Dell).
It’s apparently not a structural design flaw, as I had feared yesterday.
From Ann Althouse, who makes an interesting point about the real victims of the insistence of society that men be heterosexual:
I’ve made fun of the Oscar ads for the movie, because of the way they emphasize the relationship between the men and their wives. This ad campaign is laughable for intentionally hiding the nature of the central love story. Nevertheless, the story of the wives interests me greatly. And the political argument inherent in this part of the story is, I think, especially strong. Those who would try to prevent or inhibit men from forming lifetime bonds with each other ought to give more thought to what happens to the women they marry. Those who think a man should struggle against his sexual orientation and find a way to form the classic marriage relationship with a woman ought to think about what they are advocating for the woman: a lifetime relationship with a man who has only feigned sexual attraction to her.
Lots of good discussion as well.
People (unconvincingly, to me, and probably to anyone who’s not suffering selective amnesia about the runup to the war) accuse George W. Bush of shifting justifications after 911, but how about shifting justification for 911?
…bin Laden’s justifications for 9/11 are continually moulded and shaped by Western media coverage. At first – on 28 September 2001 – he disavows responsibility for the attacks, instead trying to pin the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself: ‘The United States should trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself