Compare and contrast: Will Lester, AP, Kerry's choice of Edwards received favorably by public, but doesn't change the race and Newseek's latest poll showing Kerry 51%, Bush 45% (Kerry 47%, Bush 43%, Nader 3% in a 3-way race).
Of course these are not necessarily inconsistent: Kerry's bounce could be independent of Edwards.
Over the years, I've developed an interest in naming and numbering. And, as it happens, I'm in the market for a new car (station wagon or the like) since the lease on my current one expires soon. So it's interesting to read that the US's supply of VIN numbers is running out.
Fafblog—evidence for the hypothesis that the nation's mental ecosystem has powerful waffle-based antibodies against evil:
“But Fafnir I do not want to read about torture” you say because you are a lazy whining person. “I want to read about gumdrops an rainbows and Presidents who are made of gumdrops an rainbows an use them to blow up the terrorists.”
No you should really read it it is a very important issue now go or I will have Giblets hit you with the waffle again.
“Blah blah blah torture, blah blah blah human rights. I like watchin things blow up on television, it gives me a feelin of comfy security, readin about human rights violations makes me feel bad.”
That does it, Im tellin Giblets to go get the waffle! He's gettin the waffle now!
“Okay Fafnir I will do whatever you say just so long as Giblets an the waffle are not involved!”
It's so easy to kind of sweep it all under your brain an think “Well theres nothin more to be said an nothin more to think about it” cause let's face it nobody wants to think about their government participating in horror. An right now the level of torture talk has gone from “Torture: Bad!” to “Torture: Bad, But Not As Bad As Saddam Hussein” to “Torture: Bad, But What About Ticking Bombs?” to “Torture: Bad, But Not Necessarily Proof That The People Who Ordered Torture Are Bad” to “Torture: We Still Talkin Bout Torture?” to “Torture: Bad?” An before we get to “Torture: Sorta Like Mowin Your Lawn” I think we should try as hard as we can to wake up.
The Campaign Desk's Thomas Lang interviews veteran Pittsburgh newsman Dennis B. Roddy, and unearths an interesting view of the effect of blogs on newspaper journalism: it's brought back one form of old-time reporting.
I bet that there are thousands1 of stories like The Artist's Statement, but that few are as well expressed or documented. Basically, this photography student is assigned to take a motion shot, so he tries to take an action shot as a train goes over a famous local bridge. It's legal, he's even checked with the park rangers, but the local cops and then the feds come and act in a rude, intimidating and I'd say unconstitutional manner.
One of the many many costs of the 9/11 tragedy is that the reaction to it has given some of the worst tendencies in law enforcement an undeserved patina of legitimacy — an attitude that flows down from the White Palace and especially the torture-may-be-legal Aschcroft Justice Dept.
What can we do about this attitude? Asserting your rights can be painful if it promotes police violence, and expensive if it results in arrest, however unjust. Photographers should certainly carry this one-page statement of photographer's rights. And over time there will be test cases, and ultimately either changes in management that trickle down to the cops on the ground.
Meanwhile, I half feel like I should start carrying a camera in solidarity. If it gets bad — and in New York it is already verging on real bad — you have to ask what gets banned in public next: pencils and sketch books? tape recorded notes? Staring?
1 A few of these other stories appear in comments to this blogs.photoblogs.org post.
The LA Times runs a story entitled Pentagon Reportedly Aimed to Hold Detainees in Secret which reports that before the Supreme Court ruled in the Guantanamo decision the DoD held a meeting in which it mapped out a plan to create a special class of 'ghost' detainees whom it would not acknowledge holding. The purpose of this exercise was, the LA Times tells us, to undermine the Pentagon's already rather ungenerous policy of limited one-sided annual reviews of the status of detainees.
Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret “for intelligence reasons,” senior defense officials said Thursday.
Under the proposal, some prisoners would in effect be kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges.
…
Two senior defense officials said they believed that the prisoners who would be denied the reviews might be held by the CIA, rather than the Defense Department.
A U.S. intelligence official said Thursday that the CIA was not holding any detainees at Guantanamo, but added that the annual reviews would not apply to CIA prisoners elsewhere.
Some bloggers are getting very excited about this but I think for the wrong reasons.
It's clear from news reports that the DoD never expected to lose the Guantanamo case. Having lost it, though, I see nothing in this report of pre-decision meetings to suggest a current policy of undermining the Court's decision. It's true that the Pentagon is now “going ahead with the status hearings:. It's also true that the Supreme Court's decision doesn't say in so many words that someone spirited away from Guantanamo to a place where the Court's writ might not run necessarily keeps his right to sue, but that is the almost inevitable consequence of the Padilla decision, especially if one looks at Justice Kennedy's concurrence, which I think will control on this issue.
So, until I hear otherwise, I am going to trust the military on this one, and indeed the DoD's official line is that “everybody under DOD custody will be subject … to the annual review process that has been outlined previously.”
Of course the key words are “under DOD custody”. The great unanswered question remains what rights — if any — the people held by the CIA will have. (Consider how bad the position is of the ones they admit to having, then imagine what happens to the ones held in secret).
The Guantanamo situation remains very troubling, but the Supreme Court has ensured that what might have been a stop on an American Gulag will — soon, I hope — become instead a regime whose harshness is cabined by legality. There is currently little reason to feel sanguine that the same can be said about the interrogation/detention centers run abroad by the CIA.
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