The New York Times has the devastating report..
It begins:
President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.
Columns: More than one route to the Hill for speaker is a political roundup column that's mostly about how Flordians are not warming to Rep. Byrd, the loathsome, craven, special-interest sellout who is the Speaker of the Florida House. This despite Speaker Byrd's tri-weekly spam emails to everyone in the state, his phoney push polls, and piles of special interest campaign money.
But the really interesting thing in this St. Petersburg Times column is the final tidbit, one that is catnip for constitutional law junkies (spotted via Flablog):
State legislators took this week off, but is it legal?
The Florida Constitution says the Legislature cannot adjourn its 60-day session for more than 72 consecutive hours without passing a concurrent resolution. The House and Senate passed no resolution when they left town last week, merely recessing for 10 days for Passover and the Easter holidays.
Former House Dean Carl Ogden says lawmakers could be forced to call themselves back into special session and re-file all of the bills that are pending or face having anything they do declared invalid by a court.
Indeed, the Florida Constitution states in Article III, Section 3, paragraph (e) that “Neither house shall adjourn for more than seventy-two consecutive hours except pursuant to concurrent resolution.”
Whether it follows that an excessive adjournment amounts to the end of the session isn't 100% obvious to me, although it makes sense if the only other alternative is to say that it's a political question for which there is no relief (always an awful answer in my book). A quick and dirty Westlaw search found little in the way of relevant caselaw. In light of State ex rel. Landis v. Thompson, 125 Fla. 466, 170 So. 464 (1936) (Legislative day can only be terminated by adjournment or some actual dispersing of assembled membership amounting to same thing), the viewpoint that an excessive adjourment terminates the session certainly seems arguble. I think Mr. Ogden has a point, and that the legislature becomes functus officio after 72 hours adjournment without a concurrent resolution. Meaning no more laws this year unless a special session is called…which indeed requires re-introducing them all.
USDA Rejects Meatpacker's Mad Cow Plan:
The Agriculture Department has rebuffed a meatpacker's plan to test every animal at its Kansas slaughterhouse for mad cow disease.
The facts are simple, and the politics raw. A super-premium meatpacker wishes to inspect 100% of his animals for mad cow in order to be allowed to export to the lucrative premium beef market Japan.
USDA won't allow it. Why? Two reasons, one ignoble, one comprehensible if mistaken.
First, because the USDA isn't about safe food, or indeed about consumers at all. Nor is it even about the interests of small agribusiness. It's about keeping the Big Farm companies' (read 'bigtime Republican bedfellows') costs down. And they don't want the precedent of 100% testing because that's expensive.
Second, and less evil, is the USDA's desire to avoid setting a precedent that might weaken its hand in upcoming trade negotiations. The administrations claims, and I'm prepared to believe (although with any science claim by this adminstration you have to wonder), that there's no scientific reason to require testing of 100% of healthy looking animals. I can understand that (providing it's true…), although you'd think that even so a real free market administration, if we had one, would allow a system where people who wanted to offer extra safety at a price could do so.
But that wouldn't be this administration: under George Bush you can't get a license to offer certified, tested, mad-cow-free beef even if you want to and think there's a market for it.
The Mirror of Justice has had an interesting series of posts debating the role of professions of faith and positions at odds with faith in Presidents and presidential candidates, the latest of which, by Rob Vischer, is More on Kerry as a “cynical nonbeliever”.
“La langue de l’Europe c’est la traduction.”
— Umberto Eco
Roland Barthes would have loved this. A Euro-MP named William Abitbol has gone and had the draft European Constitution translated into Texto SMS 'for the benefit of the younger generation'.
So here's a hipness test, dear reader. Can you read this:
Kon6an ke l'€p ét 1 continan porteur 2 6viliza6on ; ke C zabitan, venu /vag suxSiv 2 p8 lé ler zaj 2 lumaniT, i on DvloP progrSivman lé valeur ki fond lumanism : légaliTD zètr, la libRT, le rSP 2 la rézon,
If you looked at that and saw the first paragraph of the Preamble,
Conscients que l'Europe est un continent porteur de civilisation; que ses habitants, venus par vagues successives depuis les premiers âges de l'humanité, y ont développé progressivement les valeurs qui fondent l'humanisme: l'égalité des êtres, la liberté, le respect de la raison,
Then you are hip indeed. And your French is good too.
(Credit: My wife, who teaches EU law, tipped me off to this one.)
Now this is seriously depressing: The Death Clock – When Am I Going To Die?. According to this admittedly crude measure, I have less than a billion seconds to go. Sounds like a lot? Well it's less than 30 years…
Then again, the Clock also thinks that just about every senior citizen I know is on borrowed time, so I think it's a tad pessimistic here.
Jotwell Blenderlaw