Wampum

We're currently camped out less than a mile from the origination point of October's Harris Fire, the second largest of the 2007 San Diego County wildfires. About a hundred yards behind our campsite lies the remains of the first home consumed by the fire. The campground miraculously escaped heavy damage, though a number of old oak trees were lost. I've been researching the event and interviewing survivors, and plan on posting an article in the next few days, as the wildfires in SoCal appear to show how little this Administration learned from Katrina.

However, in the meantime, the Santa Ana winds are scheduled to start again any minute (literally, if you follow weather.com's detailed forecast.) We were scheduled to head back into Chula Vista (ironically, the end point of the Harris Fire,) but learned we won't be allowed to take the trailer "down the hill" during the Santa Anas. Not that I would ever want to. But flooding rains are due Thursday - Saturday, so I'm hoping for a window on Wednesday.

But we do get to go through a "border checkpoint", despite not crossing a border (or being within 5 miles of one.)

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Eight years ago today, the birth and then the sudden change of plan -- to the NICU, where we learned how to change a shirt and diaper through the ports of an incubator without dislodging the distal oxygen monitor (foot) or the electro-cardiogram leads (chest), watched the millennium bug (Y2K bug) fail to crash the world while sipping sparkling non-alcoholic cider, and moved each day from the attention-hot center of high-risk babies towards the calm wall of safe babies and the car seat home.

A year and a month later and he and MB were back at Maine Med for a week that turned into five weeks and several near misses with death.

Jonah didn't want his cheeseburger yesterday as much as he wanted some of his sister's chicken tenders.

Jonah: Chicken tenders.

Gracie: You have to ask a question.

Jonah: I want a chicken tender for me please Gracie-wah with a fish on my head.

If Jonah gets to where Sam is today in three years, or more, we shall be very happy, but we've many, many big wins already -- still alive (rinse and repeat), self-{feeding, bathing, dressing, toileting, ...}, fine and gross motor, reading, writing, counting, rudimentary arithmetic, singing, place memory, thousand word vocabulary ... and we're working on expressing disapointment as an alternative to howling. Transitions are still a bitch.

Posted by EBW at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Medical reports had at least one entry/exit pair, thorax or skull, mostly both, with brain matter protruding, and eye witnesses who transported the not yet pronounced body and who washed the pronounced corpse reported multiple entry/exit wound pairs to the neck and head.

The government selected the narratives of fatal self-injury, clarified subsequently to fatal secondary blast rebound. Definitely, no bullet wounds, no fragments either, in the body of Ms. Bhutto, according to the government.

Fixation on mechanism is a distraction from determination of agency.

This morning's dispatches in Le Monde had a quote from a woman in the vehicle directly behind Bhutto's vehicle, who recounted that she had just remarked with alarm to another person in the party that suddenly there were several unknown faces with Bhutto badges at the vehicle staging point and that she was looking away from the point of attack, distracted, when the first shot was fired.

There is footage of the shooter adjacent to another person prior to the attack, and footage of the shooter, firing, several times, at a distance of less than 4 meters from Ms. Bhutto.

Which puts the attack team at no less than two persons, and potentially larger, large enough to flood the security periphery and provoke the "sudden new faces with badges" impression in a survivor.

More than 800 people have been killed in bombings in Pakistan this year. It is unlikely that a single agency is the author of all of these operations, and in the history of political successions in Pakistan, the military and the intelligence service have acted with agency.

The Election Commission has now formally delayed the January 8th legislative election.

Posted by EBW at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pakistan:
Dawn

The Daily Times (Lahore)

India:
The Hindu

Times of India

Iran:
IRNA

[Originally posted on 11.05.07, bumped to 12.28.07]

Posted by EBW at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Benazir Bhutto, top right, is seen with her family in July 1978. From left to right are her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, her brother Shahnawaz Bhutto, her father, former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Her brother Murtaza Bhutto is at bottom left and her sister Sanam Bhutto is at bottom right. (AP Photo)

In 1979 Zulfikar Ali was the the victim of a judicial murder (hanging after conviction by a military court) staged by Muhammad Zia ul Haq, then military dictator of Pakistan. In 1985 Shahnawaz was found dead in his French Riviera apartment in Nice. He and Murtaza had organized an armed opposition to the Zia ul Haq dictatorship from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In 1996 Murtaza was shot to death by police in Karachi, a homicide that is still "unsolved".

Posted by EBW at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are saddened by the assassination of former Primer Minister Benazir Bhutto, and hope that the planners of this political murder are discovered, and the rule of law, which lawyers and judges in Pakistan have sacrificed so much to protect and maintain, remains intact and protects the innocent.

Via The Hindu:

A doctor on the surgical team said a bullet in the back of her neck damaged her spinal cord before exiting from the side of her head. Another bullet pierced the back of her shoulder and came out through her chest, he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. She was given an open heart massage, but the spinal cord damage was too great, he said.

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... an expansion of the CENTCOM Area of Operations to eastern, southern and of course, western Iran, the possibility that SIS-Appointed Musharaff and Rehnquist-Appointed Bush have created a favorable situation can't be dismissed. Freedom of maneuver for Taliban presidential assassination squads as far as Rawalpindi from the North West is profoundly surprising.

The January 8th legislatives are likely to be cancelled and a new state of emergency, somewhat fictive after Musharaff's last one just to rid himself of judicial scrutiny, is certain.

Posted by EBW at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Benazir Bhutto (PPP) was shot once in the neck at close range, and suffered head injuries from the follow-up blast which killed or wounded many people proximal to the shooter and his target, and was pronounced dead in a hospital in Rawalpindi.

A few minutes before the assassination. Here's Dawn's coverage:

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated

Benazir Bhutto dies ISLAMABAD, Dec 27: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto succumbed to her injuries in the hospital, tv channels reported. She had received grievous bullet injuries in the neck region and head injuries from the bomb blast at the election meeting at Liaquat Bagh which also claimed at least 20 more lives. (Posted @ 18:28 PST)

About 20 killed in blast after Benazir rally RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Dec 27 (AP) An explosion went off shortly after opposition leader Benazir Bhutto addressed a political rally in Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh, killing at least 20 people, witnesses said. An Associated Press reporter at the scene could see body parts and flesh scattered at the back gate of Liaquat Bagh. He counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded people. Police official Abdul Karim said Benazir had already left the area in her vehicle when the blast went off. (First Posted @ 16:05 PST Updated @ 17:34 PST)

Also in Rawalpindi gunmen opened fire on supporters of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) killing four.

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The San Diego Union informs its subscribers, page one, above the fold, with a large photo, morning print edition of December 26th, that Worshippers pack churches for Christmas amid downturn in violence . In its defense, the copy and visuals are from the Associated Press. However, headlines, subheads and ledes are the SDU's creations.

We of course, read Juan Cole, who informs his readers, wrote Christmas in Iraq that there was no midnight mass among Christians in Iraq again this year. Too dangerous.

And of the estimated 800,000 Christians in the country in 2002, as few as half, 400,000, may be left. Many have fled to Syria, joining the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees there.

About a million pairs of eyeballs will encounter the SDU's front page today, passing vending machines or other-people's-papers, and the SDU is not the only media outlet fronting the AP copy and visuals.

Peculiar, that the Chaldean Rite, together with the much smaller Syrian Rite and miniscule Latin and Armenian Rites, the Catholics, and the Nestorians, and smaller the Syrian and Armenian Orthodox Iraqi communities are described as "Christian", just like the celebrants of the SoCal Calvary Chapel franchises. Someone obviously made the choice not to use the word "Catholics" in the heading or subheading.

Posted by EBW at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The numbers for the Turkish air operations that took place on December 16th in the Qandil region of northern Iraq were released by the Turkish GHQ this morning.

200 targets engaged with 100 tons of ordinance resulting in 150 to 175 known KIA, and an unknown number of additional KIA in collapsed tunnels or otherwise buried or obliterated by blast effect.

If true, this is one of the largest mass-killings by air ops since the end of unrestricted American air ops against the former Iraqi Army in 2003, and an order of magnitude greater than any engagement of Turkish ground forces by PKK regular forces.

The PKK has an estimated force level of 3,500 in the Qandil region, which is where it has been based since 1984.

The Turkish GHQ hasn't released numbers for its air ops of December 22nd, or the operations reported by the Kurdish security services since the 22nd.

Recall, CENTCOM claims absolute air superiority over all of the Theater of Operations and is believed to have additionally provided real-time targeting data to the attacking force.

Anyone with hospital admit data from Erbil, Raniyeh, Kaladiza or Choman? Anyone care to speculate at the PKK response to 100 tons of Turkish high-explosives air-delivered with American authorization and targeted with American technical means?

Posted by EBW at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In December, 2000, the assignee did not have direct access to the data and so "discovered" (there is prior art) a method that infers the data sought. Enjoy reading link.

Of course, all those personal information forms social networks and on-line retailers vacuum up tend to geo-locate the allocations of every dynamically assigned address block ISP use to provision wireless and wireline access points.

Jonah's been vomiting during the night and so we're up with not a lot to do but read USPTO filings.

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Click on this to hear Roman Bunka play a 2:18 solo link

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In the small matter of the proposed acquisition of Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners V, LP, (Click Holding Company) By Google Inc., File No. 071 0170, only one FTC Commissioner offered a dissent. Here's a link to Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour's dissent (13pp .pdf)

Having been the point person for statistical targeting at the W3C's P3P Spec WG, I think the majority blew it, at least on the privacy issue.

If the EU approves the acquisition we'll block Google's address blocks and ban its spiders, as we currently do for DoubleClick's address blocks and spiders.

Why anyone on the left hand side of the dial bothers to (a) blog about the noxious national security mania and (b) run Google Ads is just one of those little inconsistencies "benefit" brings to any calculus of motive and belief.

Time to look at the alternative search engines.

Posted by EBW at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stole this from the Irving Housing Blog, as it sums up so much of my current attitude:

Over the past five months, I've spent a great deal of my time over at lawschooldiscussion.org (LSD), in preparation for applying to law school. It's a great community, and I've learned a lot and had a great time, despite the fact I'm old enough to be a mother to most of the posters there. However, on one issue in particular I find these "kids" pretty naive - the coming economic crash. Most aren't homeowners, and have very little appreciation for the rapid depreciation in property values and tightening credit. They don't see how the latter will effect them. I've been telling Eric for weeks now that I think the subprime crisis will spill over into the student loan sector, with money for eduction becoming much harder to come by over the next few years. It's one reason I'm thinking of putting off school for a year, for us to build a nest egg to pay for for the $25-35K tuition should I get into my dream schools sans funding.

Law school applications are apparently down 17% this year. Usually, during downturns in the economy, higher education attendance increases. Could the tightening of credit, including parents inability to cash out on equity to help finance their kid's education, be having an effect already?

Posted by MB Williams at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weekend the London-based pan-Arab Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted an unnamed Hamas official that Hamas was seriously considering the possibility of declaring an unconditional truce with Israel.

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I tried to explain this to Susie just the other day, but Suzan Harjo, proffering this year's Mantle of Shame Awards, gets to the heart of the matter:

Russell Means - for his mid-December announcement in D.C. that he is unilaterally withdrawing the Lakota Sioux from treaties with the United States. News flash to Means: treaties are made between nations; you are a person and not a nation; you are not empowered to speak for the Great Sioux Nation; as an individual, you can only withdraw yourself from coverage of your nation's treaties. (Means is the same Oglala Sioux actor who tried to beat domestic violence charges by challenging the sovereign authority of the Navajo Nation to prosecute him - he took it all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.)

While I don't agree with everything Harjo writes, e.g., her views on the Cherokee Freedmen debacle, this para is dead on. Thank you, Suzan.

Posted by MB Williams at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Mistletoe and holly mark the solstice, but the acorn in my pocket is kinder and more familiar, and warmer to the touch.

Posted by EBW at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Vice-Minister of Defense, Nikolai Markarov, just disclosed that a new ballistic missile, the "Boulava", will be deployed next year. Tests of the missile on the Iouri Dolgorouki, the first of the Borei Class missile boats from the Sevmash yards, are now complete. The Boulava is one of Putin's favorite bits of defense tech, and is touted to be "missile shield" ready, but as "missile shields" mostly manage to miss everything except the defense appropriations permanent re-authorization feeding trough, that's a given. Note the screws are shielded, and the RIA's photo set also omitted the tower and forward portion of the hull.

Markarov also disclosed that in 2009 a new tank "with an entirely new chassis, weapons systems, targeting system, and fire control" will be deployed. Whether the new tank is the Chiorny Oriol "black eagle", a 1990s design by the Omsk works and shown for the first time in public in 2004, or the T-95, from the Ouralvagonzavod works, wasn't disclosed. The Russian Army is presently equiped with the T-90, T-72 and the T-80 tanks.

Source: RIA Novosti.

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Dr. David Masters just testified that Rodney Wilson was killed by the same weapon as six other British soldiers killed over a three month period in the Basra region.

One sniper working the Basra region has accounted for 7 of the 174, or 4% of all UK combat deaths. The weapon used is an M16/M4.

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Having been within days of being released last May, the Winograd Report is now set to be released next month, and it won't be any more flattering to the Olmert troika (Olmert/Peretz/Haloutz) than the Interim Report was in 2006.

The latest scheduling hiccup is the nine day tour abruptly announced yesterday by Dana Perino:

President Bush will travel to Israel, the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, from January 8th through the 16th next year. In Jerusalem, the President will meet with President Peres and Prime Minister Olmert, and in the West Bank he will meet with President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad.

The President will then travel to Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where he will meet with Amir Sabah, King Hamad, President Khalifa, King Abdullah, and President Mubarak, respectively.

I remember how few people were uninvolved in the myths of the IDF's superiority and the Troika's invulnerability when the Thirty-Three Day War started. With Bush making the rounds widdershins between Cyprus and Tehran there will be plenty of distractions from the final report.

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I may have some commercial interest in the Games in the future, but I have to confess I won't miss the Summer Games in Beijing.

I'm partial to breathing.

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Floyd collaborated with Vine in 1969 and each produced a Custer Died for Your Sins, Floyd's was a song, and Vine's a monograph.

Indian Country Today has an obituary. Today is a good day to browse YouTube for samples of his performance work, and his conversations.

Posted by EBW at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When we look for blogs that go to the root causes, to Rehnquist's Oliphant v. Suquamish for the jurisdictional mechanism that protects perpetrators of violence against women, or Cobell v. Clinton's Babbit, then v. Bush's Norton, and now v. Bush's Kempthorne, for the principle of trust that protects perpetrators of theft of individual property, we come up thin to empty.

So we see the outpouring of cash that comes from the PayPal clickstreams of blogs that fund raise for the womens shelter on the Standing Rock Rez as kin to Missionary Barrels. Putting on our American hats we become even less charitable. Private charity, preferably channeled through Christian cults, not public policy, is the dogma of Republicans.

Make no mistake, sixty-k dollars plus a ten-k hat for any detached residential unit, would be nice, even if a handout from White Liberals, but it's no substitute for fixing what's broken anymore than holding bake sales is an effective response to defunding public education.

Yes, the following liberal bloggers posted on Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's community scoop or on their own blogs:

nbier, flautist, sarac, njgoldfinch, Devilstower, Christy Hardin-Smith, mole333, DB, William Neuheisel, and no doubt others

But they don't write about Indian issues, about what's broken and what can be fixed. They've adopted a poster child, and that's all they've screwed themselves up to the sticking point to do. To steal a quote from Noel Pearson, responding to an event that is also making the rounds in the liberal blogs, also in isolation:

In my view, unless we tackle grog and welfare, the problems of this 10-year-old child at Aurukun ultimately will have no solution.

Noel has long argued passive welfare is to blame for a complete breakdown in social norms in Indigenous communities, in Cape York and elsewhere in Australia. His point is that responding to one report of child abuse because the abuse was pack rape, and ignoring the thousands of open or unfiled reports of child abuse because the abuse isn't sexual, just malnutrition or general care -- 80 reported and 30 substantiated per month in Cape York. just isn't reality based.

And yes, on the order of eight hundred people clicked through the donations links for a total of $50,000. So here's the link to contribute to the "netroots", or DailyKos+FireDogLake+... effort to buy a single bandaid.

What you won't get from DK/FDL/... is Abramoff as a complex crook who supports tribal soverignty reckoned in billions of dollars, or the full measure of inter-locked corruption at Interior and Justice, also to the tune of billions of dollars, or the embedding of sexual assault white privilege in Federal Indian Law, not as a crime of war, as the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague determined systematic rapes in 1996 in Kosovo, but as the necessary consequence of eroding tribal criminal jurisdiction, re-affirmed every October by the Supreme Court of the United States.

And so on. These are issues, stories, complex and human interest, that these liberal bloggers don't write or link to, and haven't for as long as they've each been around as on-line venues of political writings. Its why we didn't hold the Koufax Awards this year -- we're tired of people who only read Wampum to see their names, and if their names come first, or close enough to be cool, before going back to their no-Indians-or-Dogs avocations.

We're happy to see the Feminist Law Profs Blog do a post -- Unprosecuted Abuse of Native American Women, but its Zero Hour was April this year, when the Amnesty report got earned media. We hope they go the distance, it would be good to have another progressive legal group of co-authors go the distance too.

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Ignoring the recommendations of both Arizona Senators McCain and Kyl, the Bush Administration initially rejected Hopi tribal member Diane Humetewa as the US attorney replacing Paul Charlton, ousted by Alberto Gonzales last December. Evidently, the Administration has reversed course. From Indianz.com:

First Native woman sworn in as U.S. Attorney
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Filed Under: Law | National | Politics

Diane Humetewa, a member of the Hopi Tribe, made history on Tuesday when she was sworn in as the U.S. Attorney for Arizona.

Humetewa is the first Native American woman to serve as U.S. Attorney. She was confirmed by the Senate on December 13, having been nominated to the post by President Bush on November 15.

"I am extremely honored to serve in this capacity," Humetewa said after her private swearing-in ceremony in the courtroom of Judge Stephen M. McNamee in Phoenix. "This office prosecutes one of the highest and most diverse case loads in the nation. The staff are exemplary and highly dedicated to the mission of the office."

In her new position, Humetewa joins a small group of Native Americans who have risen to the top ranks of the nation's federal prosecutors. The list includes current National Indian Gaming Commission Chair Phil Hogen, Oglala Sioux, who served as U.S. Attorney for South Dakota; and former NIGC Chair Montie Deer, Muskogee, who was an assistant U.S. Attorney for Kansas.

Posted by MB Williams at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cantlon JF, Brannon EM (2007) Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students. PLoS Biol 5(12): e328

Author Summary

Posted by EBW at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bob Kerry steps in it a second time in 48 hours. On CNN last night:

BOB KERREY: "It's something by the way I have told Barack Obama when I've met with him. It something that I've spoken about before. So this is not something that just sort of came out of the head birth out there in Iowa. I've thought about it a great deal. I've watched the blogs try to say that you can't trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite the opposite. I feel it's a tremendous strength whether he is in the United States Senate or whether he's in the White House, I think it's a tremendous asset for him.

I've been following this story around the net for the past day, watching HRC/Kerrey supporters claim there is nothing insidious about Kerrey's comments. One tact in particular takes this line that "madrassa" is simply a word for school, so there's no dogwhistling going on, no racial or religious underpinnings to Kerrey's comments.

Yes, but madrassa (madrasah) is an Arabic word. Obama attended a state-run elementary school in Indonesia, where the official language is Indonesian, a standardized dialect of Malay. The word for school in Indonesian is "sekolah."

Posted by MB Williams at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We did some Dialing for Dodd yesterday morning, ringing the Washington and district offices of members of the Senate, some of made their way to the floor to join Chris -- Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown and Bill Nelson.

Some we called did not. The biggest surprise was Bernie Saunders, who did not.

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That's the ratio of FAS diagnosed children to developmentally normal children in Aboriginal communities in North West Australia. And it gets worse from there. The infant mortality rates for Aboriginal children are three or four times higher than for non-Aboriginal children. Most of the deaths are preventable, the result of accidents, injury, suicide or infection.

Wednesday we'll post a fund-raiser for the Pretty Bird Woman House, which is coordinated by Andy Ternay of Street Prophets, aka Andyt on Daily Kos.

The 10 year old girl pack-raped at Aurukun, in Cape York, has FAS. As do some of the adolescents named, but not charged, in the report.

We just want to make the point that moral outrage has been the social basis for intervention there, and elsewhere, in the past, and that the problems are bigger than funding one Lakota women's shelter startup costs, or getting one Aboriginal child protection order and a dozen problematic felony sentences.

Things aren't too good in the Gaza Strip either. Israel blocks all imports into the strip, except for a short list of about half a dozen basic articles. 900 trucks used to be employed daily for the imports and exports of the Gaza Strip, now their number is reduced to 15. For example, no soap is allowed in.

Local water is undrinkable. Israel does not let in bottled water. Nor does Israel allow the importation water pumps. The price of water filters has gone up from $40 to $250, there are no spare parts at all for filters. Only the well-to-do can still afford them. However, chlorine is let in.

There is no import of cement. When there is a hole in the ceiling, it cannot be repaired. The building site for the children's hospital stands silent. There are no spare parts of any kind. A medical instrument that goes out of order cannot be repaired. Not even incubators for babies or dialysis equipment.

The populations of Cape York, the Standing Rock Reservation, and Gaza, have some things in common. Unemployment by design. Disintegration by design. And Settlers who can see everything but their own shadows.

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MAE West (San Jose) is known to be tapped, and the documentation suggests that the other MAE sites, Washington D.C., New York, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, San Jose, and Los Angeles areas are tapped as well.

This is wicked bad. The MAEs in Paris and Frankfurt may be tapped as well, in violation of German and French law, as well as US law. Its all data. All of it. What little is left is simply no matter at all.

Via testimony of an AT&T network engineer cited in support of the motion by Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold.

Update: Reid pulled the FISA bill until after the New Year.

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Royce Lamberth was a George H.W. Bush appointee, and viewed as a clear conservative voice on the DC Circuit. That was before Cobell v. Babbitt (then Norton, now Kempthorne) landed on his bench. Nearly ten years on the case made Judge Lamberth appear a righteous liberal when it came to the Indian Trusts, and Bush Jr., the Interior/Justice cronies and their corporate puppetmasters saw the writing on the wall should Lamberth continue to oversee Cobell. So, Bush had him removed, arguing he'd become too biased against the federal government.

While I mourned the loss of Judge Lamberth on the case, I suspected the Administration might rue the day they'd dissed him so. Perhaps today is that day? From the AP via TPM:

Judge Rejects Bush Secrecy Claim, Says White House Visitor Logs Are Public Documents
MATT APUZZO AP News

Dec 17, 2007 16:12 EST

White House visitor logs are public documents, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting a legal strategy that the Bush administration had hoped would get around public records laws and let them keep their guests a secret.

The ruling is a blow to the Bush administration, which has fought the release of records showing visits by prominent religious conservatives.

Visitor records are created by the Secret Service, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. But the Bush administration has ordered the data turned over to the White House, where they are treated as presidential records outside the scope of the public records law.

But U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled logs from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's residence remain Secret Service documents and are subject to public records requests.

In a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group, Lamberth ordered the Secret Service to turn over visitor logs regarding nine conservative religious commentators, including James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell.

"I think it's hugely significant," said Anne L. Weismann, the watchdog group's chief counsel. "The judge saw their arguments for what they were."

Send some love over to CREW and make a donation for the holidays. They do great work (and maybe will hire me when I get out of law school.)

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Chris Dodd is leaving Iowa to go to Washington City to filibuster the NSA/GOP version of the FISA bill.

I suggest viewing the demo on Glimerglass's Government and Signals Monitoring & Analysis web page. At the point where multicast is mentioned is where the technical mechanism for intercept (wiretap) is casually referenced.

If the NSA/GOP bill becomes law we will move Wampum to Switzerland. Not because of what has happened, but because of what will happen.

Update: Clinton and Obama will not join Dodd. Feingold and Kennedy will join Dodd.

Name Fax Voice

Feingold (202) 224-2725 (202) 224-5323
Dodd (202) 224-1083 (202) 224-2823
Obama (202) 228-4260 (202) 224-2854
Sanders (202) 228-0776 (202) 224-5141
Menendez (202) 228-2197 (202) 224-4744
Biden (202) 224-0139 (202) 224-5042
Brown (202) 228-6321 (202) 224-2315
Harkin (202) 224-9369 (202) 224-3254
Cardin (202) 224-1651 (202) 224-4524
Clinton (202) 228-0282 (202) 224-4451
Akaka (202) 224-2126 (202) 224-6361
Webb (202) 228-6363 (202) 224-4024
Kennedy (202) 224-2417 (202) 224-4543
Boxer (415) 956-6701 (202) 224-3553

Call'em. If the aid says (like Bernie's) that s/he is a co-sponsor, tell the aid that that is necessary, but not sufficient. Their boss must get on the floor with Dodd, Feingold and Kennedy.

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During our travels, we've encountered Mojave rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions and mountain lions. Today, we had a new visitor. A black widow spider scampered up the side of our cabinetry.

It went down the drain. Hopefully, this itsy-bitsy spider won't make it up the water spout. Just as a precaution, I've positioned two or three ceramic obstacles.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was Day 3 of the Unified Savages (Abenaki and Cherokee) assault on Schloss Disney, in the Heimat of Heimats, Anaheim in Orange County. Rides were taken, sweatshirts traded for bits of paper, and burgers, fries, and salads sampled, and in the middle of the day, between the unrestrained joys of grape and shot cannonade and pillage with Pirates of the Caribbean (some of it filmed last winter near Jalama Beach) and the fear and trembling of Thunder Mountain railroad, we stopped to take in the Nightmare Before Christmas re-working of the Haunted Mansion standard bill of fright ...

And Jonah turned at the handicapped entrance and said to me " I do not like the Haunted Mansion."

That was enough for me, so he had fries with MB, who with Grace and Sam and Kezzie had caught the ghouls on Day 1 of the Unified Savages assault on Schloss Disney, when Jonah and I were doing a bit of extra piracy.

Sam's first vocalization post-Autism-onset was at Disney in 2001 when he saw Mickey. This was Jonah's first unprompted complete verbal appropriate no, and it made my day.

Posted by EBW at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll have more to say later, but I just caught this on Google News:

Abramoff Figure Spared Prison

By MATT APUZZO - 8 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Republican environmental activist who arranged lobbyist Jack Abramoff's entree into the Interior Department was sentenced Friday to two months in a halfway house and four years probation.

Italia Federici, who pleaded guilty in June to tax evasion and obstructing a Senate investigation, was spared prison only because she has become a key witness in the Justice Department's ongoing corruption investigation.

Federici has admitted acting as a link between Abramoff and J. Steven Griles, the former deputy Interior Department secretary who for five years was her boyfriend. Griles provided Abramoff with advice and internal agency information, sometimes directly and sometimes through Federici.

Federici was way more involved than this sentence indicates, so she better have some serious goods on a big fish. Norton, Sansonetti, Barbour? I'll have to think about this one.

Posted by MB Williams at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Allan Nairn was on the radio talking about his research on Detachment 88, and his reasonably likely claim that uniformed and non-uniformed members of the US armed forces are performing intercept (wiretap) within the telecommunications infrastructure in Indonesia. Allan's work was published by Counterpunch.

It should come as no surprise that yesterday Paula Dobriansky warmly thanked the Indonesian presidency (and host nation of the Bali Climate Conference) for removing all numbers, in particular those of the IIPC, endorsed by the EU, and the G77, from the "consensus" text.

When Chris Dodd returrns to Washington City to filibuster a FISA that exculpates domestic corporate wiretappers, there's more at stake than just the civil liberties of a few political elites in North America, not a single one of whom live in, or make use of telecommunications infrastructure which originates in, terminates in, or otherwise transits, Harry Reid's Nevada.

Posted by EBW at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Russia just withdrew from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE).

Its been coming since July 13th.

I may as well quote myself, from Evolutions in Doctrine

[...]
So not only has the December coup moved 6,000,000 people from one side of the poverty line to the other, wasted over trillion dollars and at least 30,000 lives and limbs (mental health affects not included) in Iraq, inflicted over half-a-million deaths and 2,400,000 evictions among the Iraqis, it has also caused the People's Republic of China to increase its military budget by 15%, and now the former Soviet Union to adopt a new defense doctrine.

For those who collect stamps, evolutions in military doctrine are a big deal. Democrats will be paying for this in every Iron-Triangle owned Congressional District race for a decade, and the poor and everyone else, especially the enlisted service men and women and their dependents on food stamps and WIC and standing in food pantry lines will pay for it the last 10 days of every month, and that just if nothing happens at all.
[...]

Posted by EBW at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And here it is -- link.

Posted by EBW at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nii Quaynor, who I have the privilege of friendship, was just awarded the Postel Award, named after Jon Postel, who I also had the privilege of friendship, at last week's IETF in Vancouver.

I was thinking about Nii when responding to a motion to prevent ICANN funding the travel and per diem costs of persons elected to the Generic Domain Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, that as corrupt as it is, we shouldn't make it economically impossible for the best among us to sit with the worst, and the merely mediocre, to make public policy in a regime privatized by Bill Clinton and Ira Magaziner.

So a few minutes after responding to the motion in the public Registrar's mailing list I just happened to look over at icann.org and was wicked pleased and surprised to see this -- link.

Posted by EBW at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The official US delegation to the Bali meeting argued that the draft edited by Indonesia, Australia and South (see Four pages to save the world) would cost jobs and wrongly exclude poor nations.

Its the saving-the-spotted-owls-will-kill-the-north-coast argument.

The town of Fort Bragg, where we spent our Fall after leaving Iowa and traveling the northern drought belt (western Wisconsin to the Rockies, a trajectory of stunted, burnt corn, abandoned soy, and small-headed sunflowers, and historic reservoir draw-downs) bought into that big-time, and the major landmark in town is the empty acreage where the mill used to be ... before the economics of clearcut caused the distant management to shut it down and sell off everything right down to the foundations.

They didn't do too well with that choice.

Al's there.

Posted by EBW at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention - dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken - if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

[the rest of Al's speech is in the extended area. ebw]

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures - a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency - a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst - though not all - of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of
thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.