Apart from being an interesting article, This starts off with one of the best metaphors I’ve seen in a long time.
Questions for Roberts
In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Kathleen Sullivan suggests some questions to ask Judge Roberts at his confirmation hearing. These seem like very good questions; I would be especially interested to hear his answers to the third. (Four other people also contributed questions, but those seem substantially less relevant to me)
One question about which I would love to see Judge Roberts’ reasoning would be, To what extent do individuals have the right to make their own medical decisions, and why? Unfortunately this would be an inappropriate confirmation question; any of the germane subquestions would be far too likely to have direct bearing on cases that could come before the court in the future. But his thinking on this matter would be (IMHO) very illuminating: this is closely associated with the question of the rights of individuals when they do not have any obvious conflict with the rights of other individuals or the duties of the state, and therefore of his broader approach to questions such as privacy. Sullivan’s third question broaches this indirectly, though, so it may answer the matter well enough.
Of course! It’s so clear now!
The people still in New Orleans are there because they want to be there. Fortunately, our brave New Orleans superintendent of police will “save them from themselves” and their own, selfish desire to stay in the city.
What a nice guy
Here’s a brief bio of Iran’s new Defense Minister. In case anyone was wondering what an Ahmadinejad administration was going to look like, or just why the idea of Iran having the bomb is more than a little worrisome, here it is.
Worst excuse ever
Pat Robertson apologized for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez today, but claims he was “misinterpreted” by the press:
“I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ ‘Take him out’ could be a number of things, including kidnapping.”
Well, I’m glad that’s straightened out, then.
Random threat chatter
Debka report, so take with a grain of salt. The basic gist seems possible, though – there may be an attack inside the US in the next month or so. It’s smelling like it.
Watch your collective asses, keep alert to possible threats in your area.
(Hey, it’s been a while since I wrote a post or letter like this; I guess that Iraq has been good at drawing fire, if nothing else.)
Shifts in sentiment
Sometime in the past month, there seems to have been a shift of sentiment in our government, and it’s finally become allowable to admit certain things, like the fact that the war in Iraq was an ill-conceived operation, based on entirely unrealistic ideas, and has ended in almost total failure. Of course, this doesn’t quite reach to the highest levels – Bush still makes speeches saying things like “Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed” – but there’s a remarkable willingness of officials involved to finally admit that we’re leaving in the foreseeable future, having achieved little or nothing of the lofty goals which were touted at the start of the war. This article from the Washington Post is a good example; lots of quotes from various people, mostly speaking on background but unusually candid.
At the same time, there’s no conjoint movement to cut back on the encroachments into American civil rights over the past few years, nor do I expect there to be one so long as this administration continues; people have come to expect continuous surveillance, background/credit/affiliations being easily investigated, in cases tagged as “relevant to national security” things like the detention of people without any of the protections we would normally expect in civil society. Recent more subtle changes seem to assist that; for instance, US cell phones are now required to transmit GPS locations (for emergency services, of course…), and Nokia’s latest mobile services API makes it possible to write server-side applications that use that location information – without any software being installed on the cell phone. (Nokia isn’t the only one, of course; that’s just the first example I found to hand) I’ll let the technically minded among you imagine a couple of uses for that; it’s sort of a fun exercise, if you think about it as though you were a police officer, a private investigator, a marketer, or simply an armed robber.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 