Later On

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

It’s now impossible for serious observers to claim the stimulus didn’t create new jobs. The leading economic research firms — IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody’s Economy.com — estimate that the effort has already created as many as 1.8 million jobs, and will create about 2.5 million jobs when all is said and done. As far as the independent Congressional Budget Office is concerned, those are conservative estimates — the CBO believes the stimulus is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs.

It leaves the right looking for alternate rhetorical strategies. Today, House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) tried a new tack in a press release. Notice the addition of one key word to the GOP talking points:

One year [after the stimulus bill became law], not one net job has been created as unemployment rose from 7.6 percent to nearly 10 percent nationwide. [emphasis added]

Matt Finkelstein explained why this rhetorical shift matters: "The distinction here is important. By shifting the focus to ‘net jobs,’ Pence is effectively conceding that the Recovery Act did create jobs — that, while unemployment rose more than expected, we would be even worse off if the program hadn’t passed."

This also suggests that Republican officials are starting to worry, at least a little, that the economy might be improving far more than they’d like. If job creation starts picking up in a meaningful way in the Spring, as the Obama administration expects, the good news for the country may be bad news for the GOP’s midterm election strategy. They’ll need something negative to say, and pointing to net job growth may fool a few people.

But probably not many. It’s really very foolish — the recession began in December 2007, and the economy fell off a cliff in September 2008. The month the president took office, thanks to conditions Obama inherited, the economy lost 741,000 jobs. A month later, it was 681,000. A month after that, it was 652,000. Of course there’s going to be a net job loss. The net loss will exist for quite a long while. When a nation experiences a downturn of this severity — easily the worst since the Great Depression — it takes a very long time to make up the lost ground.

The goal is to see improvements and growth. Maybe Pence understands this, maybe not — he is a few threads short of a sweater, if you know what I mean — but either way, this "net job" talk is absurd.

Categorized here. To give you an idea, just the beginning:

Collaboration with colleagues and friends

Calendars and meetings

Databases
Drawings
Mindmapping
General resources

Office suites
Presentation software

Project management
Screensharing
Screen recording

Spreadsheets
Word processing

Communications

Bulletin boards
Chat boxes
Instant messaging (IM)
Video conferencing

Networking
Q&A services
Miscellaneous communication tools

Sharing files

Extremely useful information, which will become more useful as digital books become more common. The Introduction:

After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.

As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.

The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?

Below we offer a checklist that can help guide your inquiry, as well as an extended explanation of why the answers to these questions matter. Not surprisingly, some of the issues overlap. For example, Digital Rights Management, or "DRM," matters not only because of the limits it places on users, but because of its impact on innovation and competition. Yet by separating out the various issues, we hope to spur a more rigorous consideration of the various digital book offerings.

Our goal is not to tell authors, publishers, vendors, libraries, or anyone else what strategies they must adopt, or tell book purchasers what options they must choose. We hope that a robust marketplace emerges, with various business models and technologies. Instead, this checklist represents the key questions that readers should ask of each new digital book product or service to evaluate whether it adequately protects their interests. That sort of rigorous inquiry will help us decide which digital book future we want — and how to vote with our feet until we get it.

It’s also available as a PDF.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting column juxtaposing contradictory US positions, as voiced by Sec. of State Clinton. I truly cannot understand how people in government can so blithely and easily utter totally contradictory statements with the idea that people will fail to notice the inconsistency. Holding contradictory positions is illogical and ultimately leads to problems: ignoring reality always exacts a penalty—usually from reality—in the long run.

I got to wondering: do the big cats (lions, leopards, tigers, etc.) wiggle their butts before they attack? Seems like all domestic cats do, but I’m finding it hard to picture a tiger, for example, wiggling its butt before pouncing.

These sound yummy:

Marinated Olives
By Carrie Floyd, from the Culinate Kitchen collection

Total Time    5 minutes

This makes an easy appetizer served with bread and a wedge of cheese.

2 cups mixed olives, rinsed of brine
1 1/2 cups extra-virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Zest of 1 orange, removed in large strips [and pounded a bit with the back of a knife - LG]
3 to 5 sprigs fresh thyme
1/4 tsp. dried red chile flakes
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together in a large jar or crock; stir until well distributed.

Serve, or cover and refrigerate for up to a month.

UPDATE: Made them tonight. Recipe mods noted above. I just used a vegetable peeler to get the strips, and that worked fine.

The deal here is that the flavor (from garlic, thyme, and orange) goes into the olive oil, not into the olives. The idea is that when you pop the olive into your mouth, you get the flavor from the oil coating the olive and filling the hole (since the recipe uses pitted olives). Thus you could make up the oil (with garlic, thyme, and orange zest) well ahead of when you buy the olives.

UPDATE 2: The obvious at last occurs to me: when you finish the first batch of olives, buy another 2 cups, rinse them, and add them to the same olive oil, topping up if needed.

Steve Benen explains so clearly that even a Republican can understand:

Democrats are pushing the stimulus hypocrisy line pretty hard this week — Republicans say they hate the stimulus, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to secure recovery funds for their states/districts. Republicans, perhaps worried about the effectiveness of the criticism, have embraced a straightforward response.

Conservative economist Greg Mankiw summarized the GOP argument, calling the Democratic cries of hypocrisy "baffling." (thanks to reader C.L. for the tip)

It seems perfectly reasonable to believe (1) that increasing government spending is not the best way to promote economic growth in a depressed economy, and (2) that if the government is going to spend gobs of money, those on whom it is spent will benefit. In this case, the right thing for a congressman to do is to oppose the spending plans, but once the spending is inevitable, to try to ensure that the constituents he represents get their share. So what exactly is the problem?

Let me offer an analogy. Many Democratic congressmen opposed the Bush tax cuts. That was based, I presume, on their honest assessment of the policy. But once these tax cuts were passed, I bet these congressmen paid lower taxes. I bet they did not offer to hand the Treasury the extra taxes they would have owed at the previous tax rates. Would it make sense for the GOP to suggest that these Democrats were disingenuous or hypocritical? I don’t think so. Many times, we as individuals benefit from policies we opposed. There is nothing wrong about that.

This is no doubt the official Republican line. Indeed, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) made the identical argument, with the exact same analogy, on "Meet the Press" over the weekend.

But the response is deeply flawed. The hypocrisy charge may sting, but it’s also entirely legitimate.

It’s not complicated — Republicans have claimed, forcefully and repeatedly, that the stimulus effort was a mistake. The recovery spending couldn’t generate economic growth and was simply incapable of creating jobs. The entire endeavor, the GOP said, was a wasteful boondoggle, and they’re proud to have voted against it. Republicans rejected the very idea on ideological and policy grounds.

Now, we know the substance of these claims is demonstrably ridiculous, but the key to the hypocrisy charge is appreciating what else these same Republicans have said. When it comes to their states/districts/constituents, the identical GOP lawmakers have said the stimulus can generate economic growth, can create jobs, and can make an important and positive difference. In some cases, Republicans have even taken credit for stimulus projects they opposed — projects that wouldn’t even exist if they had their way.

GOP officials can take one position or the other, but when they embrace one side in D.C. while talking to the media, and then the opposite side when dealing with their constituents, it’s more than just stupid — it’s hypocrisy.

As for Mankiw’s analogy to the Bush tax cuts, this also doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. The only way this would make sense is if Democrats opposed and voted against Bush’s policy in D.C., and then went back to their states/districts to take credit for the tax cuts and boast about how effective they were.

The fact that the hypocrisy charge seems to make Republicans nervous is itself encouraging. That the GOP has not yet come up with a coherent response should encourage Dems to keep it up.

Amazing what the profit motive can do: companies are actually fighting humane treatment for animals. Anna Landman at PRWatch.org:

Front group man extraordinaire Rick Berman and his attack group, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), have launched a new Web site, HumaneWatch.org, to harass the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the country’s largest animal welfare organization. In pursuing its mission of stopping animal cruelty, HSUS has apparently run afoul of some large, wealthy business interests, and now it is getting some major pushback.

The Humane Society works to stop egregious, ongoing animal abuse, particularly in money-making enterprises like puppy mills, factory farming, dogfighting, cockfighting, and unsporting hunting practices like "canned hunts," where hunters pay to shoot at captive, domestically-raised, exotic animals. While this is a laudable goal, it pits HSUS against a significant number of wealthy, powerful businesses that engage in animal cruelty practices, like meat and egg producers, factory farmers, canned hunting businesses, contract research labs that do animal testing for big corporations and pharmaceutical companies that exploit animals to manufacture drugs like Premarin, which is used to treat the symptoms of menopause. Premarin is made from pregnant mares’ urine and is marketed by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, one of the world’s largest drug companies.

HumaneWatch.org may have a hard time trying to build public animosity towards the Humane Society, since most of civil society cannot countenance the extreme cruelty against animals that occurs in these facilities. (There are now a number of videos showing such treatment posted at SourceWatch.org). At present, Berman’s site, HumaneWatch.org, is trying to generate outrage against HSUS by ridiculing the group’s recent activities, like raising funds for animal relief in Haiti and marketing its own brand of cruelty-free, all-natural dry dog food that does not support the factory farming industry. HumaneWatch is also trying to hurt and embarrass businesses that donate to HSUS, like the Yellow Tail Wine company, which recently donated $100,000 to HSUS’s Animal Rescue Team. To target Yellow Tail, HumaneWatch.org posted a video of a cowboy standing in a manure-filled pen surrounded by cows, and pouring a bottle of Yellow Tail wine on the ground, while explaining that he is doing it to retaliate against the company for supporting the Humane Society. The video makes you want to donate to HSUS and go out and buy Yellow Tail wine to thank them for caring about animals…

Continue reading.

Of course:

Source: New York Times, February 16, 2010

Although it seems a bit like a dog-bites-man story, it is worth noting that Texas Governor and 2012 presidential aspirant Rick Perry (R-TX) has joined forces with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As the Center for Media and Democracy has documented on our SourceWatch site, CEI is well funded by Exxon and other oil companies, and it is one of the main U.S. corporate front groups fighting efforts to address Global Warming and regulate the industry that feeds it funding. And, just this week, the Texas Oil and Gas Association endorsed Perry in his re-election bid based on his opposition to carbon trading and regulation of the oil and gas industry. Although this move is not surprising, it is very worrisome because the Bush Administration was so successful at packing the courts. The Perry-CEI petition for review has been filed with the DC Circuit, an eleven-judge court that Bush was able to install four judges on, in addition to the many right-leaning judges put on the court by his father and President Reagan. Six of the current appointees were chosen by Republican presidents and three were chosen by Democratic presidents. And Chief Justice John Roberts served on the D.C. Circuit before being tapped by Bush for the Supreme Court. So, this move reflects hope on the part of those who want to throw a wrench in efforts to address global warming that they can win in the appellate court and prevail before the Supreme Court, which strongly signaled its sympathy with the corporate "rights" agenda in the discredited Citizens United decision last month. (For more information, on that case, please check out our Corporate Rights clearinghouse.) So, while the New York Times story does have a dog-bites-man feel to it, the story forebodes a much bigger story in the making, given the direction of the five men in the majority in Citizens United and the right-wing domination of the federal appellate court. And, Chief Justice Roberts, by the way, has expressed great concern about how little old Exxon is being treated for its environmental damages, as noted in this article about the Exxon Valdez case. –Lisa Graves

By email from the Center for American Progress:

While running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter said that America must have "a government as good as its people." Today, our political system isn’t living up to that challenge. Sixty-two percent of the public thinks the country is headed on the wrong track, and 75 percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing. With political stalemate the norm in Washington — on health care legislation, terrorism issues, economic reform, and presidential nominees — Americans are looking for progress and hoping that politicians will break the gridlock. Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta gave one of the most blunt assessments of the current political climate recently, telling the Financial Times that the "health of American politics…sucks." "It feels like a very frustrated country," he added. This week’s shocking retirement announcement from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) further brought the dysfunction into focus. Instead of offering the usual reasons for stepping down, Bayh cited "too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving." Bayh’s analysis is on the mark, even though he was often part of the problem. His decision to walk away from public service is, as Center for American Progress Action Fund Fellow Matt Yglesias has noted, "not a recipe for good conduct." James Fallows of The Atlantic recently wrote that the "American tragedy of the early 21st century" is that it has "a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke." But if the country doesn’t fix what’s broken, "we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away."

Read the rest of this entry »

Good post at Crooked Timber by John Quiggin:

Now that the main charges of scientific misconduct arising from the hacking of the University of East Anglia email system have been proven false, it’s possible to get a reasonably clear idea of what actually happened here. For once the widely used “X-gate” terminology is appropriate. As with Watergate, the central incident was a “third-rate burglary” conducted as part of a campaign of overt and covert harassment directed against political opponents and rewarded (at least in the short run) with political success.

The core of the campaign is a network of professional lobbyists, rightwing activists and politicians, tame journalists and a handful of scientists (including some at the University of East Anglia itself) who present themselves as independent seekers after truth, but are actually in regular contact to co-ordinate their actions and talking points. The main mechanism of harassment was the misuse of Freedom of Information requests in an effort to disrupt the work of scientists, trap them into failures of compliance, and extract information that could be misrepresented as evidence of scientific misconduct. This is a long-standing tactic in the rightwing War on Science, reflected in such Orwellian pieces of legislation as the US “Data Quality Act”.

The hacking was almost certainly done by someone within the campaign, but in a way that maintained (in Watergate terminology) “plausible deniability” for the principals. Regardless of what they knew (and when they knew it) about the actual theft, the leading figures in the campaign worked together to maximize the impact of the stolen emails, and to co-ordinate the bogus claims of scientific misconduct based on the sinister interpretations placed on such phrases as “trick” and “hide the decline”.

The final group of actors in all this were the mass audience of self-described “sceptics”. With few exceptions (in fact, none of whom I am aware), members of this group have lost their moral bearings sufficiently that they were not worried at all by the crime of dishonesty involved in the hacking attack. Equally importantly, they have lost their intellectual bearings to the point where they did not reflect that the kind of person who would mount such an attack, or seek to benefit from it, would not scruple to deceive a gullible audience as to the content of the material they had stolen. The members of this group swallowed and regurgitated the claims of fraud centered on words like “trick”. By the time the imposture was exposed, they had moved on to the next spurious talking point fed to them by the rightwing spin machine.

To keep all this short and comprehensible, I haven’t given lots of links. Most of the points above are have been on the public record for some time (there’s a timeline here), but a few have only come to light more recently. These Guardian story brings us up to date, and names quite a few of the key players (see also here). For the role of allegedly independent journalists in all this, see Tim Lambert’s Deltoid site (search for “Rosegate” and “Leakegate”).

Update I should have mentioned that much the same team had their first outing in the controversy over the Mann et al “hockey stick” graph. All the same elements were there – supposedly disinterested citizen researchers who were in fact paid rightwing operatives, misuse of accountability procedures, and exceptional gullibility on the part of the “sceptical” mass audience. Details are here (h/t John Mashey).

Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

Today marks the one year anniversary of President Obama signing into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus. As the economy continued to crater after President Bush left office, Obama’s stimulus sought to provide tax cuts for 95% of working Americans, funds to buoy cash-strapped state governments, new construction and infrastructure projects, and other programs to create jobs, retrain workers, and promote economic activity throughout the country. In December, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus had successfully created up to 1.6 million jobs, and today, a report shows the Recovery Act will ultimately create 2.5 million jobs. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that the stimulus had boosted the U.S. economy by 4 percent.

House Republican leaders have fought to maintain partisan unity in their effort to kill the stimulus. And they were largely successful. Every single Republican in the House and every single Republican in the Senate — with the exception of Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), and then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter — voted against the Recovery Act. By drawing a sharp distinction between Obama and the GOP, Republican leaders gambled on casting the stimulus as a failure in order to win elections in 2010. In a coordinated effort, Republicans have used every opportunity to attack the stimulus for allegedly failing to create “a single job.”

Last month, President Obama admonished Republicans for going to “ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.” It’s true: Last year, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) appeared at a ribbon cutting event for GetAbout Columbia’s MKT Plaza, a pedestrian walking and recreation area funded by the stimulus. (See picture at top right.)

ThinkProgress has investigated opponents of the Recovery Act, reporting throughout the year that many of the lawmakers who tried to kill the legislation have been returning to their home states to claim credit for popular stimulus programs. In a new research report, ThinkProgress finds that over half of the GOP caucus, 110 lawmakers — from the House and Senate — are guilty of stimulus hypocrisy. Among some of the key findings:

– Top Republican Senate Recruits Are Stimulus Hypocrites: As ThinkProgress reported, Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), a candidate for Senate, touted over $5 million in stimulus programs he voted to kill. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), the GOP nominee for Senate in Illinois, signed a letter urging Gov. Pat Quinn to provide “Recovery Act (ARRA) funding to expand the Illinois Community College Sustainability Network.”

– GOP Leadership Leads The Way In Hypocrisy: Although he regularly slams the stimulus as a waste while in DC, McConnell has returned to Kentucky to take credit for stimulus programs, even taking time to request more funds. ThinkProgress attended two job fairs held by Cantor, where we found dozens of employers able to hire directly because of the stimulus. Indeed, even Boehner’s office released a statement boasting that the stimulus will create “much needed jobs.”

– The Audacity Of Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds: Many opponents of the stimulus have been quite brazen with their ability to try to claim credit for the program. For instance, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) spent the morning of July 28th railing against the stimulus, yelling “Where’s the stimulus package? Where’s the jobs?” on the House floor. On the same day of his rant, Kingston’s office sent out multiple press releases bragging that he had secured hundreds of thousands in stimulus funds to hire additional police officers in his district. Other stimulus opponents, like Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) — who has called the stimulus a “trillion dollar debt bill” — have printed out jumbo-sized ceremonial stimulus checks to present to local communities to try to garner positive press.

Individually, over half of the entire Republican caucus has hailed nearly every aspect of the stimulus as a success — from infrastructure funds, to food programs, to education grants. But politically, admitting its success might harm the GOP’s chances in November. So with Republicans fixated on winning politically, they have focused on deceiving the public by calling the stimulus a failure, while pretending successful programs aren’t stimulus funded.

And also note this:

Interesting:

Source: The Washington Independent, February 9, 2010

The big financial services company Citibank is dodging Congress’ new laws to protect consumers from unfair and usurious credit card company practices. The new law prohibits credit card companies from raising interest rates whenever they like, on short notice or no notice, and for no particular reason. To get around this, Citi mailed out letters announcing it was raising its rates for all of its customers to its bad-creditor rate of 30 percent, and telling customers that they are eligible for a "program" that lowers their interest rate back down to the previous rate they had been paying. The only catch: if they miss a payment their rate will zoom back up to 30 percent immediately and retroactively — exactly the kind of behavior the law sought to end. Citi believes their behavior is legal because they are calling their new policy a "program" rather than a "rate." Citigroup customers only have only two options: go along with Citi’s new "program," or pay off any remaining balance, cancel their credit card and try to find a different company.

In the meantime, the GOP continues the fight against better regulation of the financial services industry and is determined to kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Steve Benen of Political Animal:

Over the weekend, Vice President Biden made a rather bold claim about the administration’s counter-terrorism efforts: "There has never been as much emphasis and resources brought against al-Qaeda. The success rate exceeds anything that occurred in the [Bush/Cheney] administration."

Today, David Ignatius considers whether the claim is accurate.

The Karachi raid [that led to the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar] is part of a broad offensive that has sometimes been overlooked in the partisan squabbles over whether the Obama administration should be giving Miranda warnings to terrorist suspects. "The real action has been pounding the hell out of al-Qaeda and its allies around the world," the official argued.

The numbers show a sharp upsurge in operations against al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan since Barack Obama took office…. All told, according to U.S. officials, since the beginning of 2009, the drone attacks have killed "several hundred" named militants from al-Qaeda and its allies, more than in all previous years combined. The drones have also shattered the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban, which has been waging a terror campaign across that country. [...]

[S]urely the country can agree, looking at the evidence, that Obama has been no slouch in pursuing what he said in his inaugural address was a "war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred."

It’s simply astounding to hear conservative Republicans claim that President Obama has been "weak" on counter-terrorism. Short of having the president air-dropped into mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan with a knife in his teeth and an assault rifle on his back, I’m not sure how more aggressive Obama could be. More to the point, he’s far more forceful and successful on the issue than Bush — who somehow managed to cultivate a bogus reputation of "toughness" — ever was.

The AP had a similar assessment the other day, emphasizing, among other things, that Obama’s decision to reduce the U.S. presence in Iraq has "freed up manpower and resources to hunt terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan." It’s an approach that "intelligence officials, lawmakers and analysts" believe is working. Obama has also made regional gains with constructive outreach to Islamic allies, which has bolstered international cooperation.

Those of us who take national security matters seriously can take comfort in the fact that congressional Republicans can’t filibuster the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism efforts. GOP obstructionism can undermine the economy, the strength of our health care system, and our national energy policy, but fortunately, Obama is the Commander in Chief.

Tom Friedman has a column today in which he takes on the denialist community. He begins:

Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill.

When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that “it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to the Capitol with a big sign that says “Al Gore’s New Home,” you really wonder if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore…

And what is driving this is the increasingly ominous signs of worldwide climate change, nicely summarized in this post specifically written as a illustrated reference for those who read Friedman’s column and clicked the link. In fact, the post at the link is must reading for any climate-change denier that’s willing to click a link. (Some are unwilling, so greatly do they treasure their fantasy.)

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for the pointer to this article by H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye:

On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally released a "seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed’s torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were criticized by the British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed’s torture places the implementation of the Bush administration’s so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA’s secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed "black sites" by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program’s roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950′s with the CIA’s Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency’s own files. This is the so-called "Lyle O. Kelly case." The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounds interesting:

The Lost Origins of the Essay

by John D’Agata

A review by Meehan Crist

Central question: How can we read the history of the essay as a history of art?

"What word is there to describe this kind of logic that sings?" — Plutarch

Every history is a story, a marshaling of evidence to support a particular reading of the past. Of the Silk Road or Nordic myth. Of Alexandria or pirates or the atom bomb. John D’Agata’s history is of the essay, that redheaded stepchild of literature which, he laments, is often mistaken for "a genre that is merely a dispensary of data — not a true expression of one’s dreams, ideas, or fears." There is a problem, he argues, with thinking that the nonfiction tradition originates in records of fact, as in how many bushels of wheat a man once owed his neighbor. It denies the genre a tradition as art. "I think this misperception is prevalent today because we haven’t yet laid claim to an alternative tradition…. I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce."

This search soars across centuries, continents, and literary forms, from an ancient text by Ziusudra of Sumer to The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon to the prose poems of Baudelaire to a "performative essay" on Bob Marley by Kamau Braithwaite to a stunning meditation on love, lust, and the lyric by Lisa Robertson. Along the way, D’Agata carves out a story about the art of nonfiction that is plausible, and possibly even true.
Faced with the fabulous diversity of the pieces collected here, a reader may begin to wonder: What is an essay? Blake’s "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"? (Surely the poets claim this one.) Borges’s "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"? (Didn’t I just see that in Ficciones?) Artuad’s "Eighteen Seconds"? (Is there a genre for impossible theater?) To complicate matters, some of these "essays" are excerpts from longer works, and others are new translations prepared specifically for this anthology. The skeptic may suspect the editor is tampering with historical evidence. And yet, if you follow D’Agata’s reasoning in the brief introductions that frame each text, you cannot help but see the family resemblance across "a form that’s not propelled by information, but instead by individual expression — by inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt… a mind’s inquisitive ramble through a place wiped clean of answers." Thought happens; imagination happens; the actions of the mind are events as real as the passing of wheat from one hand to another.

"The word for it is recent, but what it does is ancient." — Bacon

Asking what an essay is leaves us groping for an answer to the wrong question. Perhaps we should be asking …

Continue reading.

Nancy Youssef in McClatchy:

Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was nearing the end of a 25-minute question and answer session with troops serving here when he raised a topic of his own: "No one’s asked me about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’" he said.

As it turned out, none of the two dozen or so men or women who met with Mullen at Marine House in the Jordanian capital Tuesday had any questions on the 17-year-old policy that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military — or Mullen’s public advocacy of its repeal.

Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Darryl E. Robinson, who’s the operations coordinator for defense attaché’s office at the U.S. Embassy here, explained why after the session. "The U.S. military was always at the forefront of social change," he said. "We didn’t wait for laws to change."

Some Republicans in Congress have expressed outrage at repealing the ban in wartime and the Pentagon has embarked on a year-long study on what impact the repeal might have.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., urged Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to "keep the impact it will have on our forces firmly in mind."

Yet those gathered at Marine House made it clear they’ve already accepted the idea of gays and lesbians serving among them.

Of far more interest to them were other areas, they told Mullen, such as allowing women to serve in infantry units. They also asked about relations between the military and the State Department and, more narrowly, when a key Defense Department official would be assigned to Amman permanently.

Indeed, since Mullen appeared on Capitol Hill earlier this month and told a stunned Congress that in his personal view, gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve, the response among members of the military has been little more than a shrug.

After Tuesday’s question-and-answer session, Mullen told McClatchy that although he’s held three town hall sessions with troops since his testimony, not a single service member has asked him about the issue.

At Tuesday’s session, …

Continue reading. It’s all over. The bigots lost, but are still fighting even when they have to renege on their previous promises—e.g., John McCain said that when the heads of service said it was time, he would support it. Instead, he’s fighting it. I guess being a maverick means you can’t be trusted.

Bill Lindelof in the Sacramento Bee:

The signs of autism are not present at at 6 months but show up gradually later in an infant’s first year, a UC Davis study reveals.

Contrary to what autism experts once thought, signs of the disorder appear later in an infant’s first year of life. Most babies are born apparently normal before a gradual decline begins between 6 and 12 months of age, the study done at the UC Davis MIND Institute and UCLA shows.

A lack of eye contact, smiling or babbling are signs of autism, and researchers focused on those developmental markers during examinations in a five-year period. They concluded that autism’s symptoms are not evident in children under 6 months.

The study showed that by one year, social and communication behavior of autistic children had dramatically deteriorated.

"This study provides an answer to when the first behavioral signs of autism become evident," said Sally Ozonoff, study author and professor at the MIND Institute.

Researchers say the study is noteworthy because of the accuracy and precision of observation during lab visits.

"Until now, research has relied on asking parents when their child reached developmental milestones," said Ozonoff. "But that can be really difficult to recall."

In addition, parents who make video recordings of their children often turn off the camera when behavior is poor, exactly when autistic symptoms may appear, a MIND Institute news release states…

Continue reading.

The brush is my French Plisson High Mountain White 12 with horn handle, and the soap is, as you see, Pré de Provence. I got an extremely good lather, and the razor, a UK Gillette model (Rocket? Ambassador Junior? I’m not sure) with a newish Astra Keramik blade did a fine job: three passes and a little polishing to perfect smoothness. And of course Geo. F. Trumper Spanish Leather is a favorite aftershave.