December 01, 2003
Blogshares Is Dead
I never did quite get around to figuring out the rules, but it was interesting to see who linked to me and watch my “valuation” gyrate (but generally rise) for no discernable reason. Now it’s dead. BlogShares - Closed Down. I think I had a ‘market share’ of something just over .0065% towards the end there…
Dear BlogShares players,I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be reopening after the current technical difficulties are resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and looks to be for the next few days.
The latest system crash has highlighted to me that deliverying a fun, useful service for the BlogShares community requires an active operator and developer. As most of you are no doubt aware I’ve been neither for the past couple of months. That has led to a decline of quality service, new features and ultimately income for the site and it looked likely that there wouldn’t be enough to pay for next month’s hosting.
…
My goal with the project was always to embrace the power law and to provide a new way of highlighting blogs with a little bit of fun. I’ve been pleasantly surprised of how well it did and stupefied it did it for so long. Now, however, it is time to move on to other things. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me in the not so distant future. You can also find me at my perpetual home: monkeyx.com.
All the best,
Seyed Razavi
Colorado Supreme Court Strikes Down Mid-Decade Redistricting
Yahoo! News - Court Says Redistricting Unconstitutional
DENVER - In a decision that could have national implications, the Colorado Supreme Court threw out the state’s new congressional districts Monday because the GOP-led Legislature redrew the maps in violation of the constitution.The General Assembly is required to redraw the maps only after each census and before the ensuing general election — not at any other time, the court said in a closely watched decision. A similar court battle is being waged in Texas.
Under the ruling, Colorado’s seven congressional districts revert to boundaries drawn up by a Denver judge last year after lawmakers failed to agree.
The issue before the court was whether the redistricting map pushed through the Legislature by Republicans this year was illegal. Colorado’s constitution calls for redistricting only once a decade and Democrats contended the task was completed by the judge.
I look forward to reading this decision. I’m more than prepared to believe that there may be state Constitutional law issues here; but much as I think mid-term redistricting is despicable, it will take something substantial to convince me that there is a federal constitutional law violation here. (Although I can imagine what some of those arguments might look like.)
The relevant constitutional text reads, “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
That text suggests Congress may have control here — and perhaps in the face of a long tradition of decenial redistricting, its authorization is needed for more frequent changes? Which means I need to find the relevant legislation…
As should be clear from this rambling, this is not a clause I’ve ever thought deeply about. It’s not the clearest either, so I am persuadable. The Colorado case doesn’t seem to be online yet though, and I think I’ll put off research until I read it.
Dollar vs. Euro Suggests Bush Economic Plan Fails Basic Market Test
Once again justifying the Economist’s Big Mac Index, which had been saying the dollar was overvalued, the dollar has been crashing against the Euro. This is particularly noteworthy as the Euro-area is not itself in the most wonderful economic shape. Which means that the currency traders think we’re in even worse shape (click the imgage for details of the slide over the last 30 days). Lovely.
Our Friends Are Getting Worried that Bush Plans to Cut and Run on Iraq (Like Afghanistan)
Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil visits Washington D.C. and finds….doom, gloom and a sense that the Iraq invasion is falling apart with appalling consequences: Scotsman.com News - International - Inside story of how Washington is losing its bottle
“In both places it is worse than you think,” I was warned before arriving in the US capital for a series of off-the-record briefings. The warning was accurate.Take Afghanistan first. You don’t read or see much about it these days. The reality is grim. The Taliban is resurgent; al-Qaeda is there too, but not as relevant as it was. Attacks on aid workers are soaring; many are refusing to leave the urban areas. The warlords are back in control of the countryside, where opium production is already above pre-invasion levels. “Afghanistan is a narco-economy once more,” said one intelligence analyst.
The Taliban regularly mounts attacks in the rural areas and is expected to hit urban centres with greater force. “If they knew how weak we were,” confided one intelligence source, “they would have done it already.” Coalition forces are confined to Vietnam-style strategic hamlets from which they emerge for operations only in great force, before returning to their enclaves. Hamid Karzai’s grip on power is tenuous.
It is not much better for Iraq. There are now an average of 130 attacks a day on coalition (mainly American) forces; almost 100 coalition troops have been killed in November, the grimmest month so far. “We only have a third of the forces we need to fight the insurgents,” one former US diplomat told me. The intelligence is threadbare too: US commanders have no real idea who they are up against, except that they are well-organised remnants of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime, supplemented with some al-Qaeda-type Islamo-fascists. “We still don’t really know who is behind the attacks,” I was told. “So we just go around kicking doors in - which is exactly what the enemy wants us to do.”The US forces might lack purpose or direction but there are plenty of both to the insurgents’ attacks. The UN was specifically targeted; it is now effectively gone from Iraq. Next were the various non-government organisations trying to assist in building a better Iraq; they, including the Red Cross, have also headed for the exit. Then it was the turn of what few allies America has in Iraq, specifically the Italians. Those most at risk now are Iraqis co-operating with the US. Last week a US commander reported a slackening of attacks on his own troops because the insurgents were concentrating on assassinating those they see as quislings.
Now it is the Americans themselves who seem to be in a rush for the exit. On September 22 Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, attacked France for suggesting a speedier transfer of power to Iraqis. Yet since President Bush summoned Paul Bremer, his Iraqi governor general, to the White House, that is exactly what is happening. Bush wants a substantial withdrawal of US forces before next November’s elections. Former Pentagon favourite, Ahmad Chalabi, is dismayed: “The whole thing [the speedier transfer of power] was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October [2004] for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government.”
The consequences on the ground are apparent. Until recently, US forces took 12 weeks to train Iraqis for the new police force; that has been speeded up to one week. No proper checks on individuals are being done, so trainees have been infiltrated with insurgent spies. US intelligence officers were horrified to discover recently that the insurgents even had details of Bremer’s schedule.
Bush is fond of saying that America did not spend so much in men and materiel to liberate 25 million Iraqis only to succumb to a ragbag of insurgents. Yet it looks as if that is exactly what is happening. The insurgents have noted that a few very big bombs have already forced Washington to speed up its exit strategy; that can only result in even bigger bombs.
No wonder the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration are in retreat: their policy of replacing Middle East tyrants with democracy and functioning economies is in grave danger of falling at the first hurdle, largely from lack if American willpower. The consequences of defeat and retreat, of course, are so grave that I cannot believe any US president can contemplate it for long; but what exactly Bush plans to do about it is a mystery which nobody I met in Washington was able to resolve.
Domestically, the administration may be able to get people to ignore what is happening on the ground and instead concentrate on a speech, or a nice telegenic image. But it appears that the hostiles in Afghanistan and Iraq may not be watching Fox news.
"You are talking about overthrowing 800 years of democratic tradition."
Let me be blunt: if Padilla loses his appeal, this isn’t a free country any more. That doesn’t mean it’s a prison state either, there are many shades of gray in life and it will still be freer than many, but any country where the goverment can grab a citizen off the street, lock them up indefinately in solitary without trial or a lawyer, that’s not a free country in my book.
It seems that former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy Viet Dinh, one of the most hard-core right-wing members of the new conservative legal establishment, agrees, albeit more politely. Patriot Act Author Has Concerns.
Dinh said he believed the president had the unquestioned authority to detain persons during wartime, even those captured on “untraditional battlefields,” including on American soil. He also said the president should be given flexibility in selecting the forum and circumstances — such as a military tribunal or an administrative hearing — in which the person designated an enemy combatant can confront the charges against him.The trouble with the Padilla case, Dinh said, is that the government hasn’t established any framework for permitting Padilla to respond, and that it seems to think it has no legal duty to do so.
“The president is owed significant deference as to when and how and what kind of process the person designated an enemy combatant is entitled to,” Dinh said. “But I do not think the Supreme Court would defer to the president when there is nothing to defer to. There must be an actual process or discernible set of procedures to determine how they will be treated.”
Dinh first flagged his concerns in a speech he gave in September at a human rights conference in The Hague sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He reiterated them this month during a panel discussion with Chertoff and others on national security and civil liberties at the conference in Philadelphia.“The person next to me said, ‘My God. He is saying that the Padilla case is wrong!’ ” said Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who also sat on the panel in Philadelphia and who agrees that the administration view in the case is wrongheaded.
“There has to be some form of judicial review and access to a lawyer,” said Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. “That is what habeas corpus was all about. That is what the Magna Carta was all about. You are talking about overthrowing 800 years of democratic tradition.”
I remain naively faithful that Padilla will win in the end. But if not…if not…then what do we do?
Weapons of Math Instruction
Brian Leiter’s Weapons of Math Instruction shows that it’s possible to laugh about Really Serious Stuff.
Another Minor Bush Mystery Explained: Why There Was So Much Sex in that UN Speech
At the time George W. Bush gave his speech to the UN, the speech that everyone expected would be devoted to Iraq, the amount of time devoted to the evils of the international sex trade seemed mysterious, even inexplicable. The best explanation I could come up with at the time was that it was filler thrown into the speech becuase the warring factions within the administraiton couldn’t agree on much else.
Now, though, an alternate explanation is taking shape: Karl Rove is a genius. The speech was an attempt at political innoculation against the potential corrosion from the Neil Bush sex scandals stemming from his divorce case.
Here’s how even staid CNN describes Neil Bush’s deposition testimony in his divorce case:
He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.
“Mr. Bush, you have to admit it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her,” Brown said.
“It was very unusual,” Bush said.
One has to wonder whether Neil Bush is so stupid as to not have figured out what was going on, or whether he’s so stupid as to think this lack of knowledge is credible testimony. But that’s almost beside the point.
The point that matters is that this incident just might explain why GW felt a need to get on record on the sex trade issue?
Of course, the real irony here is that the political innoculation was probably unnecessary. It looks as if there won’t be a Neil Bush sex scandal: the press is playing this one with even more restraint than the circumstances warrant … the exact opposite of press behavior during the last adminstration.