Later On

I mean, apart from those who have lost a family member to US attacks (drones, ground troops, bombs, etc.). I wonder if things like this (reported by Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker) have anything do with it:

A top Tea Party leader, enraged by a plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero, has referred to the Islamic deity as a "monkey-god" and to Muslims as "the animals of allah." His Tea Party group, meanwhile, tells TPMmuckraker it’s not concerned about the rhetoric.

Mark Williams, the conservative talk radio host who is listed as chairman of the Tea Party Express and acts as a frequent spokesman for the group, wrote on his blog Friday:

The animals of allah for whom any day is a great day for a massacre are drooling over the positive response that they are getting from New York City officials over a proposal to build a 13 story monument to the 9/11 Muslims who hijacked those 4 airliners.

The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god and a "cultural center" to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult.

Williams continued:

The longest, most heavily researched and footnoted chapter in my book is about the fruit baskets and nut wads that gravitate to Islam and why it attracts such mental cases…

And he posted an image of the prophet Muhammad with a swastika on top of his head.

The building at issue is a project of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative. It will include a community center, a mosque, a gym, and other public spaces. The local community board voted unanimously to approve it, though such approval was not technically necessary, since the Islamic groups own the land.

Williams has a history of incendiary remarks. As we reported at the time, in February he called President Obama "a half-white racist" in an email to colleagues.

None of this appears to have prompted Tea Party Express — the prominent Tea Party group created and run by a California GOP consulting firm — to rethink its ties to Williams. Asked about the comments, Joe Wierzbicki of TPE told TPMmuckraker: "It doesn’t have anything to do with the Tea Party Express and the issues addressed by the tea party movement, and was written on Mr. William’s personal blog, and not on any Tea Party Express website, blog or social networking page."

But an activist for Tea Party Patriots didn’t mince words. "This is hate speech and has no place in the tea party movement," he said.

With guys like this looking out for the US, we’ll quickly see terrorism drop off because the terrorists will realize that he  has their number! In fact, this guy is so effective at this, I think we should send him into Pakistan and Afghanistan on a single-person setting-them-straight mission.

Interesting—take a look.

Mistermix at Balloon Juice has a good insight to the different attitudes the two companies have as a result of their goals: Google wants to sell advertising that’s well targeted to individual users (e.g., no REI ads directed at me), and Apple wants to sell hardware. The difference in goals ripples through all their decisions.

Worth reading his whole post.

I think the problem is that Dr. Paul has long enjoyed the company of other libertarians, and they reinforce each others’ view as they spin their free-market fantasies of incredibly limited government: a government that (apparently) has no zoning authority (telling people what they can build and what business they can have—that’s none of the guvmint’s bidness!), no public-health authority, no way to outlaw discrimination, and so on—basically, a government that is eager to turn everything over to businesses, which it promises not to regulated. The free market would then solve all the problems.

That this is insane doesn’t matter, since they talk only to each other. But then, Dr. Paul decides to run for office and trots out his standard bundle of libertarian notions and is astonished that people REALLY don’t like what he’s saying.

Steve Benen has a good write-up:

Republican Senate candidate and right-wing ophthalmologist Rand Paul got into a little trouble this week while explaining his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To a lesser extent, his disagreement with the Americans With Disabilities Act also raised a few eyebrows.

When Wolf Blitzer asked Rand about his ADA opposition, tried to make his concerns sound reasonable. "[L]et’s say you have a local office and you have a two-story office, and one of your workers is handicapped," the Republican said. "Should you not be allowed maybe to offer them an office on the first floor or should you be forced to put in a $100,000 elevator? … [M]y understanding is that small business owners were often forced to put in elevators, and I think you ought to at least be given a choice. Can you provide an opportunity without maybe having to pay for an elevator?"

At first blush, that may not sound ridiculous. The problem, as Yahoo News’ John Cook discovered, is that Rand Paul has no idea what he’s talking about, complaining publicly about the ADA without knowing what’s in it.

The legislation specifically exempts the vast majority of buildings three stories and under from any requirement to install elevators. In other words, if you are a small business owner and you have a two-story office and one of your workers is handicapped, no one can force you to build an elevator. It’s true that the exemption doesn’t apply to health care facilities or shopping malls or buildings four stories and up — and Paul, who has an ophthalmology practice, may have been thinking of those provisions when he insisted that businesses are "often forced to put in elevators."

Trouble is, we searched far and wide for a single instance in which a private employer was successfully sued under the ADA for failing to provide an elevator, or was compelled by a lawsuit to do so, and we came up empty. We searched the case law, contacted ADA experts — both proponents and opponents of the law — the Justice Department, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Not one of them knew of any case involving the government-ordered installation of an elevator. It looks like Rand Paul is either peddling a myth or spinning some vanishingly small number of elevator installations we’ve yet to hear of into an epidemic big-government overreach.

That’s because, while the ADA does impose a burden on employers and business owners to make their facilities accessible, it also contains reasonable restrictions on what owners and operators of existing buildings can be forced to do.

When Cook asked the Paul campaign to substantiate the candidate’s concerns, it did not respond.

Paul’s bizarre worldview is troubling enough; is it too much to ask that he read up on the issues he claims to care about?

It is interesting, though, that Paul’s libertarianism goes right out the window when his paycheck is involved: he gets 50% of his patients (as noted, he’s he’s an ophthalmologist) through Medicare, and he not only wants to preserve that (government-run healthcare) program, he wants payments to doctors (for example, himself) to be increased. Nice that he puts principle aside to feather his own nest.

And they want just one thing—the hairy brutes! Rachel Ehrenberg describes in Science News a typical male tactic, the hairy brute in this case being the topi antelope:

Male topi antelopes will resort to deception to keep a potential mate around, snorting as if there’s a lion nearby just when it seems she might wander off. The discovery is the first report of outright mate deception in an animal other than Homo sapiens, a research team reports in the July American Naturalist.

Some mother birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their nest, and there are reports in animals such as monkeys and squirrels of males deceiving other males in the heat of competition. But the male antelope behavior “is the clearest example of tactical deception between mates in animals other than humans,” comments Cornell University’s H. Kern Reeve, an expert in the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. “This is quite interesting.”

Study leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen discovered the devious behavior while studying topi antelopes on the savannas of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where during the spring mating season males stake out territories rich in grass. The female antelopes are sexually receptive for one day only, and they spend that day visiting several males, munching grass and mating.

Bro-Jørgensen noticed that when a female would start to wander away from a male’s territory, the male would look in the direction she was headed, prick his ears and snort loudly — the same snort the animals use when they’ve noticed a lion, leopard or other approaching predator.

“It was quite funny — it made me laugh,” says Bro-Jørgensen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England. “It’s such an obvious lie — clearly there’s no lion.”

Suitors in nature commonly exaggerate their virtues. But this work documents a rare situation in which evolution favors outright lying in the mating game, says Reeve. The cost of the lie is minimal to the male antelope — he merely snorts. But the cost to the female of ignoring the lie could be great — if there truly is a predator nearby, she’s dead.

To test whether the males were lying outright, Bro-Jørgensen and his colleague Wiline Pangle of Ohio State University in Columbus first …

Continue reading.

It’s quite revealing that Obama refused to give his commission subpoena power. Obviously, this commission is window-dressing and is not intended to dig into the dirty details, since that might require action. This is the same conservative Obama that has forbidden his Justice Department to investigate crimes committed during the previous administration (except, of course, for the swift and vengeful prosecution of whistleblowers who expose government wrong-doing—Obama doesn’t like those guys at all).

Obama also thoughtfully put at the head of the commission an oil-industry representative, who can help cover up any problems that might emerge. William Reilly, the co-chair, is a director of Dupont and of ConocoPhillips and the commission is also to include people from the oil and gas industry. (Obama apparently loves conflicts of interest.)

If your stomach is strong, you should read this post by Marcy Wheeler that lays out the differences between a good commission to investigate (the structure and mission statement proposed by Edward Markey and Lois Capps) and the ineffectual cover-up scheme that Obama created.

Obama really knows how to let down the team. Can you think why? Afraid of conflict? Protective of Big Business and Big Government? Doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with finding out what’s wrong and fixing it?

I don’t get it.

I went early to do some grocery stops. At the Grove Market I got a wonderful hanger steak (2 lbs! so I will cut into 4 steaks and use my Jaccard on it as well—and I’m going to search some marinades), an extraordinarily nice T-bone (1 lb) that looks a lot more like a Porterhouse.

I also go the fresh garbanzos shown in the photo (guess how you can enlarge the image). I’ve never seen them before, but they look easy to prepare. These are still in the shell except the one I shelled, shown in front to prove that these are indeed garbanzos. Also, I got some Casa Sanchez (local company) Pico de Gallo, which I’m enjoying a lot these days: tasty, fresh, raw, and low-calorie.

I have an enormous plastic pitcher—1 US gallon—that I use to hold my cold breakfast cereal. When it gets low, I add more cereal and also, from time to time, raisins and walnuts. I mix up the various cereals (Kashi, Grape Nuts, muesli, etc.) in the pitcher. So today I bought some more cereal for that.

I saw Avatar last night—late to the party, I know. Some thoughts:

In terms of racial/ethnic identity, the movie struck me as uncomfortable viewing for white Americans, since it reflects rather graphically how white Americans treated native Americans, not to mention African-Americans. All the usual tactics were shown: viewing the victims as animals rather than people, using derogatory slang terms for the victims, blaming the victims for not doing instantly what the whites wanted them to do, little hesitation in slaughtering them to seize any lands of value.

When you look at the sorry history of the US in its genocide of native Americans—deliberately spreading disease (the smallpox blankets), the various massacres of tribes (Wounded Knee and others), the Cherokee Trail of Terrors when they were forcibly removed from their lands so whites could have the land—and we did similar things even much later: put the native Americans on the absolute worst and least productive land in the country, and then when uranium was discovered, forcing them to move. The US treaties with native Americans have always been a joke: they exist mainly, it seems, to keep the native Americans quiet, and white Americans abrogated the treaties at will.

I don’t think this is “liberal guilt,” whatever that is. I see it as recognition of what white Americans did to the people who lived in the country before them. (The Spanish have their own sordid New World history to deal with, but at least they didn’t go the genocide route.) I don’t feel any personal guilt, but I do recognize the history of what happened and can make moral judgments about it.

At any rate, I thought it was an excellent movie. The technology of the mining operations control room was wonderful eye-candy and also made sense in terms of our current direction of development. And there were some neat moves—e.g., using a (thin) tablet computer to copy an image directly from the large virtual screen. I would think that wheelchairs of that period might be more advanced: motor-propelled, for example.

The butterfly on the arrowhead was a direct steal (and acknowledged as such) from Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, a movie worth seeing in its own right: a B-movie script in the hands of an inventive director.

Worth seeing, IMHO.

Click for close-up.

Lilac shea-butter shaving soap from Honeybee Spa, which produced a very good lather with the help of the Simpson Harvard 3 Best. The Pils with a Swedish Gillette blade did its usual great job, and a splash of Booster Lilac sealed the deal.

Jason Clarke at Download Squad:

Ask MetaFilter poster Dan Reetz reached out to the community on that site to ask for help when he discovered that a friend of his — an ex-student from Russia — may have found herself caught up in a human trafficking scam.

She and a friend had traveled to the US on the promise of work when they arrived, only to have the job offer mysteriously dry up. The thread is an emotional roller coaster, as Dan tries to help his friend from across the country and tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to convince her that she’s in a dangerous situation.

I have never seen a thread of more helpful, on-topic information anywhere online. As the story unfolds, Dan is given contact information for various agencies that can help with human trafficking victims. He eventually enlists help from a number of agencies and regular people, and the story has a happy ending.

If you start reading this thread, you will probably lose an entire hour of your time, but you won’t regret it. Online culture has taught us to be cynical and expect the worst from people. Reading this thread reminds you just how wonderful and helpful people really are.
[via boingboing]

Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

About 15 hours after Massey CEO Don Blankenship told Congress that worker safety is the company’s top priority, another Massey miner died in West Virginia, The Associated Press reports.

State of West Virginia spokesman Hoy Murphy says 55-year-old James Erwin of Delbarton died about 6 a.m. Friday.

Murphy says Erwin was pinned between a piece of heavy equipment and the wall at Massey’s Ruby Energy mine in Mingo County on May 10.

The Ruby Energy Mine — one of the 57 operations highlighted last month by the Mine Safety and Health Administration for having a troubling safety record — has racked up 82 safety citations since April 5, when 29 miners were killed (and another seriously injured) at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in nearby Raleigh County.  Twenty-seven of those violations were deemed “significant and substantial,” indicating that they are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness.”

One of three musically talented brothers (Elvin, drummer; Thad, trumpet), Hank Jones was an absolutely wonderful pianist, whom The Son actually saw perform in New York City and told me that an observation I had made decades ago—that percussive musicians (drummers, pianists, bassists, vibes, etc.) can continue playing extremely well into old age, whereas wind-instrument musicians (trumpet particularly, perhaps, but also clarinet, trombone, and so on) tend to perform not so well in old age, though many are still great and make good strategic choices on how to treat a song. Dexterity endures better than breath, I suppose.

The NY Times has a nice obit by Peter Keepnews, and the LA Times has an obit by Don Heckman that’s also worth reading.

Listen to why he’s going to be missed.

The number of men who shave every work day and hate the task is amazing, particularly when it’s possible for them to actually enjoy and look forward to shaving. I don’t think women are fully aware of how much most men dislike the chore.

And that, of course, is the reason I wrote the book: to help men who shave learn how to enjoy the experience. And, on the whole, it seems to work (see reader reviews at Amazon.com or watch this short video testimonial from a surgeon).

I thought I should point this out as we approach graduation days and Father’s Day: if you know men who shave and don’t like it, the book would (I think) make a good gift. It was written to be a gift: it begins by making the case for this method of shaving, on the assumption that the reader might not previously have thought about it.

So that’s my pitch. Think about it.

Apparently it’s not all that difficult if you know what you’re doing and have lots of money. Ian Sample in the Guardian (with a video at the link):

It was a dream that began nearly 15 years ago, when Craig Venter, a Vietnam veteran turned geneticist, resolved one day to create a genome from scratch – and with it, make the first ever synthetic life form. Last night, in a dramatic announcement that led some to accuse him of playing God, Venter said the dream had come true, saying he had created an organism with manmade DNA.

The feat, hailed as an epochal scientific breakthrough by some but an alarming development by others, was achieved by scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland using little more than a computer, some common microbes, a DNA synthesizer and four bottles of chemicals.

The result – after $40m (£28m) and more than a decade – is the first microbe that thrives and replicates with only a synthetic genome to guide it. Every "letter" of its genetic code was made in the laboratory and stitched together, forming an artificial chromosome 1m characters long.

Despite the scale of the achievement, the organism in question could scarcely be more lowly – it is based on a bacterium that causes mastitis in goats.

While scientists and philosophers have already begun to debate the potential consequences and moral implications of the work, the motivating force for Venter is commercial. His team has an even more ambitious dream: to create organisms that are not only new, but also lucrative. Venter has secured a deal with the oil giant ExxonMobil to create algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel — an innovation he believes could be worth more than a trillion dollars.

The new bacterium, Venter said, is "the proof of the concept that we can make, in theory, changes across the entire genome of an organism, that we can add entirely new functions, eliminate those we don’t want, and create a new range of industrial organisms that put all of their effort into doing what we want them to do. Until this experiment worked, the whole field was theoretical. Now it is real."

To create the organism, Venter’s team began with …

Continue reading.

Very interesting story by Louis Sahagun in the LA Times:

The " Kevin Costner solution" to the worsening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may actually work, and none too soon for the president of Plaquemines Parish.

Costner has invested 15 years and about $24 million in a novel way of sifting oil spills that he began working on while making his own maritime film, "Waterworld," released in 1995.

Two decades later, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard plan to test six of his massive, stainless steel centrifugal oil separators next week. Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser welcomed the effort, even as he and Louisiana officials blasted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for delays in approving an emergency plan to build sand "islands" to protect the bayous of his parish.

"It certainly is an odd thing to see a ‘Kevin Costner’ and a ‘centrifugal oil separator’ together in a place like the Gulf of Mexico," said actor Stephen Baldwin, who is producing a documentary about the oil spill and Costner’s device. "But, hey, some of the best ideas sometimes come from the strangest places."

Meanwhile, "Avatar" director James Cameron has said that he would make his underwater vessels available, and actor-director Robert Redford appeared in a commercial, sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, that uses the spill as a clarion call to move forward on clean energy.

It is not the first time Hollywood has come to the rescue with cutting-edge technology. Paul Winchell, a versatile ventriloquist and the voice of Tigger in " Winnie the Pooh," was also an inventor who patented an early artificial heart in the 1960s. In 1940, glamorous movie star Hedy Lamarr helped design an un-jammable communications system for use against Nazi Germany.

Costner was unavailable for comment. But his business partner, Louisiana attorney John Houghtaling, said, "Yes, Kevin is a star, but he took his stardom and wrote all the checks for this project out of his own pocket. This was one man’s vision." …

Continue reading.

I really believe that Obama is taking the country in an ominous direction with his continued expansion of special Executive powers. Greenwald comments on another instance:

Few issues highlight Barack Obama’s extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world — far away from any battlefield — and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this was called "Bush’s legal black hole."  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo.  Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram — including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned.  Amazingly, the Bush DOJ — in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention — contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind.  In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there,embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely." 

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss.  They quickly appealed Judge Bates’ ruling.  As the NYT put it about that appeal: "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight."  Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.  When the Boumediene decision was issued in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." But Obama hailed it as "a rejection of the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo," and he praised the Court for "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."  Even worse, when Obama went to the Senate floor in September, 2006, to speak against the habeas-denying provisions of the Military Commissions Act, this is what he melodramatically intoned: …

Continue reading. Are you as disappointed as I?

Very interesting developments in the UK, commented upon by Greenwald:

Over the past couple years, I’ve written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain — between the Tories and Liberal Democrats — in opposition to the Labour Government’s civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism.  In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government’s efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities).  Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party’s establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government’s growing powers.  Back then, the Liberal Democrats’ Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis’ resignation, and to show his support for Davis’ positions, Clegg even refused to run a Lib Dem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues ‘go beyond party politics’."

Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties — Actual Change — show no sign of retreating.  Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy.  Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832."  He railed against a litany of government policies and proposals that form the backbone of Britain’s Surveillance State, from ID Card schemes, national identity registers, biometric passports, the storing of Internet and email records, to DNA databases, proliferating security cameras, and repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights.  But more striking than these specific positions were the general, anti-authoritarian principles he espoused — ones that sound increasingly foreign to most Americans.  Clegg said:

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Greenwald: Lawrence Lewis at Daily Kos:

Congressman Dennis Kucinich is introducing a bill that would ban extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens:

Earlier this year, The Washington Post and The New York Times revealed that the Obama Administration was continuing a Bush-era policy of including U.S. citizens on lists of people to be assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).  These citizens have had no trial. 

Under such a system, U.S. citizens are added to the list simply for being suspected of involvement in terrorism, in subversion of their basic constitutional rights and due process of law.  Their right to a trial and to present a defense is summarily and anonymously stripped from them.  Following the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that detainees being held indefinitely in Guantánamo Bay were to be afforded habeas corpus rights, thirty-three of thirty-nine detainees were ordered released on the grounds of insufficient evidence to support accusations of their involvement in terrorism.  If a U.S. citizen is added to the targeted assassination lists based on accusations absent judicial review, their punishment is death. 

In a hearing of the House Select Committee on Intelligence earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair testified that the President authorizes such operations if it is deemed that they are seen to pose a “continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  Leading legal scholars such as Bill Quigley, the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions are among the legal voices challenging the legal authority for the U.S. government to conduct extrajudicial killings.

Intelligence operations that have virtually no transparency, accountability or oversight raise serious legal questions, particularly when the outcomes of such programs constitute possible violations of international law and violations of the Constitution of the United States.  Congress has the responsibility to protect the rights of all U.S. citizens.  We must reject the notion that protecting the constitutional rights of some citizens requires revoking the rights of other citizens.  My legislation would reaffirm our commitment to upholding our nation’s basic constitutional principles, and prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens abroad.

Clearly, Kucinich isn’t likely to succeed in passing a bill that would shut down Administration policy. But the point is to further publicize that policy. And to emphasize how egregiously wrong it is. On that note, Marcy Wheeler very pointedly wonders why such legislation is necessary:

Isn’t there already a piece of paper that prohibits such things?

Has anyone tried out this app?

Disciplanner.com is a web site for tracking long term personal goals and bad habits. No hourly schedules, just commit to weekly goals and record time, that’s it.