Aaaauuuuooooooooo!!!!

What Is Your Animal Personality?
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One oddity of these quizzes: none of them mention blogging as a pasttime or a venue of communication. It's like we're inventing quizzes for people of the 1980s....

Protect Yourself, a little

While your personal information is still yours you can legally require that it not be shared: Ten Tips is a great collection of things to make 2006 more pleasant....

It is unlikely that these privacy protections will be permanant, as the concept of intellectual property oozes its way across all kinds of common-sense boundaries: eventually, the fact that a company has the data will mean that the only way to prevent them from profiting from it is by paying them protection money. Or, perhaps, we should institute more democratic reforms to keep our elected officials responsible to the citizenry instead of the artificial corporate persons PACs....

Index: Impeachment

Suddenly, it seems that everyone's talking (on the left, anyway; I particularly like this one, and this roundup) about "the I-word" in relation to the administration's admission that it couldn't care less about the law (that's why they have lawyers: to find loopholes, or the appearance of loopholes, that will allow their allies who control Congress to talk their way out of investigating or impeaching anyone), at least there's a prima facie case that the President is not only violating the rights of Americans but, and this is more likely to get him impeached, ignoring the will of Congress.

Well, this is as good a time as any to make an index page for my own Articles of Impeachment. After all, some of us have been on the case for a while now:

9 April 2011: The Most Comprehensive List of Scandals and Legal Violations.
16 March 2009: Torture.
25 January 2009: Vanity Fair: An Oral History of the Bush White House
2 June 2008: Fundamental and deliberate malfeasance in military affairs (see also here)
14 March 2008: Interfering in regulatory process
4 March 2007: GreyHawk's "short list" of impeachable offenses and a pointed call to both parties' representatives in Congress.
23 January 2007: reckless disregard for the lives and health of US service personnel and first responders, not to mention the rest of us.
1 December 2006: Elizabeth de la Vega's indictment of top administration officials, up to and including the President, on charges of conspiracy to defraud
26 November 2006: Petition outlining ten charges against the President and Vice President.
14 September 2006: Counterpunch Roundup of criminal acts by Administration
8 September 2006: For militarizing, privatizing and "reorganizing" functional government agencies to create disastrous incompetence.
24 May 2006: An excellent review of historical issues relating to impeachment, pointing out the political dynamics of the process
9 April 2006: Plame Leak Damaged National Security and Signing Statements are UnConstitutional. That's my take, anyway.
14 March 2006: Dan Savage's ITMFA (Impeach the M-F Alread) site is up, but all it has so far is attitude and logo stuff. With luck, his readership will provide him with content soon.
7 March 2006: Juan Cole's Top Ten list isn't very impeachable, but Bush-Blair conspiracy, interfering with the military and unspeakable torture should be.
11 August 2005: Speculation about indictments from the Plame leak
6 May 2005: of course, misusing intelligence data to defraud Congress and the American people into a war is the ultimate high crime.
7 April 2005: threatening the fiscal soundness of the government

Do you think President Bush hasn't considered his culpability and legal exposure? Of course he has. The one thing that all his Supreme Court nominees have had in common is extreme deference to presidential authority; it's a defensive strategy.

• Roberts
• Roberts and Miers
• Miers
• Alito

And there's already some preemptive talking points out there, pointing out things done by previous (i.e. Democratic) presidents which didn't result in impeachment (though other lesser things did, under Republican dominated Congress, so what gives?). But it's possible to really discuss impeachment with even hardcore Republicans, and it's worth it.

Christianity: Advanced Seminar

It's hard have a religiously mixed family: religion is a very personal and sensitive matter. But when the entire family is not only one religion, but all members of the same sect, it shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong, because people within even a single movement can't agree on the core theological/ritual issues anymore. What's weird, I guess, is that there are literally hundreds of Christian sects, so that every possible permutation of Christian theology is pretty well represented. But still, within the movements are fights like the one over infant/child baptism/communion, a disagreement at, at one time, marked the major divisions within Protestantism.

Maybe it's just the Anglican/Episcopal thing: having really not gone through Reformation, as such, they have to catch up.

Ghost of Cheney Past:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

-- Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, 1991

You can read the rest here. As Sgt. Bray says, Wow.

Self Parody Alert

Book title, seen recently: Pit Bulls for Dummies.

I think there's an "are" missing, myself...

Perpetuating Errors

Arendt quotes Bainbridge:

In sum, the Patriot Act was a "hasty change that overturns long-established customs and principles." We should not have compounded the error by rushing through a renewal. Congress should be commended for having given itself time to take a deep breath and make sure that it has an opportunity for full debate and evaluation of each provision and proposed amendment rather than making hurried changes at the last minute under the gun.

He quotes him a lot, so I might have to start reading him directly... maybe later.

Anyway, does anyone else think that the extension of the USA Patriot Act was a really bad tactical move by the Democrats? It feeds into the "there's an emergency, a war on" hysteria. With all respect to Prof. Bainbridge, Congress has had plenty of time to discuss and consider the Act; the time had come to revise it or, my preference, let it die. By forcing the administration to let the act expire rather than compromise the most egregious civil liberty violations, it would put the Republicans on record as inflexible and the Democrats as, for a change, principled.

Catch-22!

In response to Anne Zook's entirely justifiable concern about these poor souls, I replied

Sad to say, I think the judge has it more or less right: what the administration has done, by its illegal actions, is create a situation which would be the pride and joy of a law school prof's hypothetical collection: there is no legal option. The judge, unlike the chief executive, is incapable of ordering actions which violate the law; only Congress can authorize exceptions (or the Executive, if it's regulatory instead of statutory); Judges can invalidate law, but the problem is that the executive has failed to follow perfectly reasonable laws.... Joseph Heller, eat your heart out.

We can add it to the impeachment list...

As Anne Zook says, Ho. Ho. Ho. (actually, that phrase has been ruined for me ever since I read Neil Gaiman's take on it.) Merry Christmas, anyway.

p.s. Does Santa Exist?

So the system works.... not really.

The Religious Policeman reports that the teacher sentenced to three years and 750 lashes for teaching science and tolerance has been pardoned, along with another teacher sentenced to a similar punishment for criticizing arranged, loveless marriage. It's nice that the Saudi's decided, given the publicity involved, to pardon these men, but it leaves in place a system which will produce more of them.

Of course, if you're shameless, then even publicity won't stop you. No, you'll just claim that those who oppose you are "soft"....

Works for the Saudis. Why not us?

Yoo, who?

A wise man said:

One of the big mistakes made in the process of developing legal positions following September 11th was that certain lawyers at State and in the military services were excluded from some of the conversations. These are the lawyers most adept at understanding international law, especially the law of armed conflict.

Who was responsible for bypassing them? Who's the administration's go-to guy for legal opinions favoring monarchical power and might-makes-right international relations? Yoo, that's who.