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There are dishes on every rooftop, many dishes on the multi-stories. In the late evening a wedding party arrives at the hotel, women ululate in the street. On the tube is an costume drama in English, with subtitles in Arabic, about Blackbeard the Pyrate, from Ocracoke, which I watch, having crossed two seas from Ocracoke, just to watch. Arg!
Susan and Tom, at Hannaford Hall, USM.
These two men are the heads of quasi-governmental talks with the Taliban, the first for the tribal councils the border region of Afghanistan, the second for the tribal councils of the border region of Pakistan. They are inviting the Talibans and others, all the armed oppositions involved in conflicts with the two states, and the foreign forces, to establish contacts between the oppositions in both countries, joint contacts, through this joint tribal council.
Unfortunately, not only will the foreign fighters from West Asia with the suicide vests ignore this follow-up to the 2007 "Peace Jirga", but the foreign fighters from North America and Europe with the drones and rockets will ignore this too.
Still, Abdullah Abdullah & Owais Ghani are doing the difficult, but better work.
So, I too filled in the little ovals before traveling to Cairo, Egypt (an American Overseas Monarchy where bloggers are arrested). I too tried not to think about it while I was doing it. I too disliked the fact that Carter was an avowed born-again Christian, and I too wrinkled my nose over Bill Clinton, but I never, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought I'd be voting for someone who supported unrestricted wiretap and eliminating the capital gains tax. Like Avedon.
I really, really dislike the fact that I'm voting for the campaign that made misogyny mandatory in Democratic youth politics, that successfully branded Bill Clinton as a racist, and that has run a pathetic field campaign to the tremendous detriment of the House candidates in the competitive districts. Without the multi-bank plotz, Congressional Dems would be forecasting another '04, not another '06.
I profoundly dislike the fact that I'm voting for the George W. Bush & Henry Paulson gift to the worst generation of speculators and thieves since 1929. That in effect, I'm forced to vote for Ronald Wilson Reagan's dismantlement of the protective regulatory regime created by FDR and subsequent Democratic administrations.
I'm revolted by the fact that I'm voting non-prosecution under the UCMJ for an enormous cohort of criminals, and for "honorable retirement" for flag officers who should be looking across the tables at military prosecutors at courts martial, documenting under oath the implementation and execution of the Cheney crimes.
Had Nader, or McKinney, stopped flirting with "ballot access", and simply ran straight ahead races in the dozen competitive states and made the two center-right campaigns earn their electoral votes, I'd have to consider an alternative to the lesser of the two center-right baskets of complacency with bad ideas.
I'm voting for a younger, post-partisan, Joe Lieberman, and the misogynist, race baiting incompetents he rides with. The ballot's in the mail.
A friend in Oslo called me up yesterday to chat. He passed along the fairly surprising news that Iceland would like to abandon its current currency, and adopt Norway's.
The full cost of Milton Friedman's influence on what was once a "small open economy" has been glorious inflation, tax cuts for the wealthy, fantastic growth in the financial sector and housing ... followed by an inability to pay for pasta imports, "loans" from Moscow and the IMF, and the abandonment of its currency.
Read talos' diary at EuroTrib Iceland - Friedman's folly.
Senator Stevens (R-Alaska) was found guilty today on all counts in his corruption trial.
I keep getting mail from the Allen campaign, rapid response for the Collins campaigns' exploitation of missed votes.
Rather than responding that these were excusable absences, to deal with ordinary family issues of sickness and death, I wish response were that during the heyday of Susan's party, the entire Democratic House Caucus could have, and probably should have, behaved like the Dems in the Texas Legis when that body was threatened by a one-party dictatorship, and held their sessions in adjacent states. The whole country would have noticed the problem with the GOP's agenda if Dems hadn't tried to fix bills they weren't allowed to read before voting on, but instead spent a Congress or two (its been three actually) in London, across the river from Detroit.
Perfect attendance isn't what advances the interests of the constituency, its working out co-sponsorships that move bills beyond "idea" to Committee, and advance those bills in Committee to the floor, and there wasn't a lot of that during the Delay/Lott years of socially accepted single-party political rule.
So Susan has a better record voting "present"?
Imagine a primary between Michael Michaud and Chellie Pingree when Susan retires, and Maine Dems falling for one or the other making the claim that attendance is more important to Maine Dems than issues like choice or the bailout.
There are votes that matter. Fortunately, they don't happen every day that Congress is in session, or we'd be dead from exhaustion.
Why did Dick Cheney want to kill the building site guard, his wife, their four children, and two construction workers? Why did he want the press cycle to be about "rat lines"? The big interlocking foreign policy stories are the short-horizon things -- today's crashing markets news, the Europeans and the Asians doing dollar-independent crisis policy groundwork, and the longer-horizon things -- the "oil shock" to the nations that get 90% of their foreign currency from oil -- Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela, as well as to the Gulf states, not to mention the FT (London's market) endorsement of Senators Obama and Biden over Senator McCain and Governor Palin. That's what is getting bumped lower down, below the fold, surrending copy and air-time minutes to "rat line".
Who was he sending the "Fuck you" too this time? Tzipi Livni?
Why, in the past few days, did Dick Cheney decide to have sixteen Marines dismount from their transport and spend 15 minutes chasing three men, one woman and four children through a construction site and shooting them all dead?
I'd do op-eds for the Bangor, Augusta and Portland papers, and copy for a the final radio and tv spots.
We can't win by assassinations. Predators eroding the tranquility of the Pakistan-Afghan border, one extended family at a time. Squads harvesting the souls of farmers, their wives and their children, in villages along the Iraq-Syria border, with side arms.
We can't win by being the criminal violence that wipes out local law enforcement when ever the under-uniformed, under-armed, under-trained, and above all, under-appreciated locals are incidentally in the kill zone.
The Bush/Cheney strategy, to which Susan Collins is a signatory, of careless assassination, is wrong.
We should be helping peace officers, those with uniforms, and those without, those from Islamabad or Kabul, and those from the tribal autonomous areas between them, to establish the peace.
We should be helping Syria police the Syrian border with Iraq.
Killing makes the illusion of "success" immediate, and every corpse, even women and children, become pacified hostiles. But others pick up the fallen torches, the recovered weapons, and much more certain than we. So that does us less than no good.
We have to cut the crap. The Pak-Afghan frontier needs peace, police, wheat and work. We have to grow, not a state, Pak, Afghan, or other, that's not our choice, but a state of fewer, and smaller, armed operations, diverging away from several overlapping wars. Ultimately, our offer is not weapons, but wheat.
Tomorrow morning the man who mistakenly signed the Syrian Sanctions Bill needs to speak out as the Representative from Maine who can't allow Marines to rotor over the Syrian border and shoot farmers and day laborers,
There are seven effective mornings left in this campaign. Susan signed on to assassination. Maine has an alternative, Tom.
There are multiple reports in the Syrian media that four US helicopters penetrated 8 kilometers into Syria and attacked a building under construction in the village of Al Soukkariya, in the region of Abu Kamal, the principal point of passage between Iraq and Syria, killing 9 and wounding 14 of the inhabitants.
The Pentagon has issued a denial, and CENTCOM "is investigating".
Updates:
Landis has a relayed phone call from an eye witness. The soldiers debarked and shot people who were working in a building under construction on the periphery of the township. The people shot were poor simple people from the town. Two of the wounded are not expected to survive.
Its down.
The Cairo exchange lost 6.79%. The Kuwait exchange fell 3.5%. The Dubai exchange fell 4.8% and the Saudi exchange fell 4% after having lost close to 9% on Saturday.
So where did that 25 billion to Goldman Sachs go? To their M&A war fund? Oddly, that story seems to have fallen off the NYT's pages since mid-afternoon yesterday, when we read it while on the ferry between Ocracoke and Hatteras.
My choices are Juan Cole's "Napoleon in Egypt" (which I tried to convince my partners in crime would be a wicked kwel "gift" at our booth at the ICANN Cairo meeting, but we're going with logo'd polo shirts at about twice the unit cost, with my co-workers having to schlep dozens of the damn things (800) in their personal baggage, we're novices at freight forwarding and customs and have no "booth babes" on tap), Miroslav Verner's "The Pyramids", and Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum".
My other fall-backs are learning another programming language, a knock-off of the famous "Little Lisper" for Scheme is smiling at me from the bookbox.
Any recommendations?
Tom Allen has only a few days left to define why this election is important. Critical Insights of Portland has 54% for Susan, and 42% for Tom. Twelve impossible points. Her internal polling must not be so rosy for her to be going so sharply negative. Going negative cost Chellie the election six years ago.
I wish I could help. I'm tempted to write the same damn thing I wrote for Chellie six years ago, a why, and therefore how, Democrats should run on defense. It never made it to Chellie, and what Dem would have had the gall to run on defense in 2002, against an incumbent sitting on the Committee on Armed Services? We need to know why we need Limestone AFB back on active status, why the Brunswick NAS actually is important to the control of the North Atlantic, and what the North Atlantic means to the US, and therefore to Maine.
We need to know why it makes a fundamental difference whether the Bath yard produces blue water DDGs, or brown water LCSs, and we need to know why former SecDef Rumsfeld and former SecNav England's attempt to shut down the North Atlantic submarine and anti-submarine capabilities in the last BRAC round were a bad idea, not just for Maine, but for New Hampshire, Connecticut, and the United States.
We need to know that the annual Reforger, the exercise of mating up the stream of heavy armor on Roll-on/Roll-off maritime transport and air-bridged Maine Guard units, in Western Europe, isn't "historic" and "curious", but a saner exercise than any "long war" composed of disjoint, ideologically "linked" asymmetric conflicts, over bananas or crude oil.
We need to know that what happens in Europe happens in Maine. That the Atlantic hasn't grown wider by thousands of miles since 1940, or that there isn't a symmetrically armed state on the other side of the Atlantic, and that the only existential threat to either state ... is each of our arms.
We need to have the case put in front of us that Susan is the weaker candidate on the defense of Maine, both to the southern looters of the military budget, and to the armed instabilities of the developed, trading world that includes Maine. That its not her gender, or her party, but her intellectual weakness, her complacency with whatever she's told, the lack of basic Yankee hardheadedness asking about the fundamentals, asking if SecNav England's or SecDef Rumsfeld's or the Bush/Cheney regime's numbers actually add up, or not. And we need to be reminded that William Cohen became SecDef, Maine isn't one of the places where military spending is just tarted up corporate welfare, and "don't know" isn't a phrase that passes as an answer.
We need to have the case made that we are making choices, that we chose the weapons, and the wars, by whom we send to the House and Senate, and that we are not passive spectators, lacking responsibility and consciousness, but the same Maine that sent ships and crews into the North Atlantic in 1942, and 1917, and regiments to Pennsylvania and Virginia before that.
This is worth reading. Andrew J. Bacevich's The Petraeus Doctrine in The Atlantic.
Afternote: MB reminds me that during the entire course of my posts on the BRAC round, that I've never really explained the southern movement of defense spending during the past four decades. That would take some time.
Or your burg could "buy 'Merican" and get fitted up with a bunch of used Hummers.
And its $185,000. We're taking that as a given, and yes, three years of staff-time to review an application for Wales or blogs or ... soup spoons seems a trifle dear.
It is a major win for Verisign, recall, ICANN was created to transform a monopoly market into a competitive one, that Verisign bears zero cost, and the entire new gTLD process is supposed to be self-supporting, with "no cross-subsidization".
The 2000 round cost was one quarter the cost now proposed, though to be fair, only 7 of 40+ got approved, and no fees were returned, so the effective cost is equivalent, assuming that all current paid applications are approved.
With any luck Rubini will win the day, the markets will be closed for a week, and we can blame ICANN.
An amusing picture of Sarko from yesterday.
The CAC went under 3,000 mid-morning and is currently down 7.5%. London and Frankfort are in the same region. The Russian exchange fell 10% today. Tokyo closed down 9.6%, Bombay closed down 10.96%, Hong Kong closed down 8.3 %, and Seoul closed down 10.6%.
So, will today's impassible barrier be 8,000 or 7,500? Trading in the S&P futures index and the DJIA futures index has already been suspended in Europe as these indices reached their daily limits of a 5% drop.
The following is from the Battle of the Somme, July 20th, 1916, near the village of Dompierre. Not only is the last of the Poilus in France dead, but the problems caused by most Republicans, and abetted by quite a few Democrats, since Carter aren't going to be fixed in a few glorious weeks after some August, in some 1914 of the mind.
Kelly Teal, Business and Regulatory Editor, writes at the Xchange, My apologies to the great Dr. Seuss:
Oh! The Connections John Has!
Congratulations!
You’ve gotten your way
You have more bars in more places!
And looks like they’ll stay!You have dough in your coffers
You have sway on the Hill
You can steer Sarah Palin
any direction you will.
You’re not on your own. You have Rick Davis, you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where he goes.You looked up and down Sedona. Looked it over with care.
About it you said, ‘I have no bars there.’
With your dough in your coffers and your sway on the Hill,
you vowed to get cell coverage – ‘Dammit, I will.’Now VZ and T
moved in their towers.
And for free, of course,
an homage to your powers.It’s betterer there
with cellular air.Out in D.C. people will gab
and frequently do
‘bout someone archaic,
yet high-profile as you.But when folks start to talk
don’t worry. Don’t balk.
Just go right along.
You’ll start chit-chatting too.OH!
THE CONNECTIONS YOU’LL HAVE!
Washington Post: Exclusive: Verizon and AT&T Provided Cell Towers for McCain Ranch
I've lost count of the number of times I've blogged that US forces in Iraq have been co-opted into a militia for the electoral edifice created by farce (remember, the candidates were anonymous) during Paul "Boots" Bremer time on target.
How about August, 2004 (and several times subsequent):
a cease-fire supports our troops.a cease-fire ends planned manuvers that are likely to result in battle, and removes the americans from the iraqi domestic calculation of the balance of forces. it isn't peace, but it is better than what we have, because we don't know who the real rulers of iraq are, or will be.
as long as our troops are proping up some party or another, they will be the "buffer" between the militia of a party that can't hold onto civil government by its own organic means, and the other militias that are no worse qualified.
Yesterday Admiral Michael Mullen said that without the SOFA Iraqis would be exposed to significant losses. Secretary Robert Gates said "dramatic consequences" and some American official "on background" said that the US security details for President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, ... would be withdrawn.
I couldn't help but laugh. For four years, fourty one hundred US KIA, thirty thousand plus US wounded, on the order of one point two million Iraqi KIA, another four million Iraqi refugees, and now approaching three trillion dollars, we've been told that there is no cause and effect relation between US troops and Iraqi politics.
So, the offer is sign the SOFA or die.
Update: The security detail of Minister Mahmoud al-Sheikh Radhi, a convoy of six or seven four-wheel-drive vehicles, was engaged with a car mounted munition near Tahrir square in central Baghdad just a few hours ago. 11 KIA, including 3 members of the minister's security detail, and 22 wounded, more than half of the detail. The minister of labor was not killed or reported as "wounded".
The photo has nothing to do with the fact that Tom Allen and Susan Collins debate, this evening at the WCSH studio in Portland, and tomorrow evening at the Hannaford Hall on the USM campus in Portland. It simply beautiful, and compared to the McCaine/Palin mess, and the Hate Hillary mess before it, politics in Maine is a thing of ... unsurpassed lack of ugliness.
Susan will have a chance to make the case that the existing for-profit health insurance regime is the better choice for limiting access to medical care, and that the well documented wastage in paper handling and the "responsible party" chase are better than Medicare for everyone. She also has the chance to make the case that the wealthy really have the better plan for the economy, that the energy industry remains the better choice for the custodian of energy policy, and that things are going swimmingly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I wish I could be present. If Susan Collins can make the case that she is the better choice for middle class and small businesses and swing the independent and persuadable margins of both parties it will be a rhetorical triumph on par with Richard Nixon's "I have a plan" device.
Here's the link to the Act Blue page to support Tom.
Recall, he and about 150 other "voluntary mowers" prevented a Monsato contaminated plot of "corn" from going to tassel. A couple of acres.
The list of Talibans who were in the reconcilliation talks in Mecca last month is interesting, no, amazing.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a respected intellectual, the former ambassador from the Taliban government to Islamabad, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the former foreign minister of the Taliban government, Mullah Shahidi responsible for media for the Taliban government.
Also present, several "mullahs from the interior", a representative from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who's group Hezb-e-Islami, carried out the operation on French forces on August 18th, and a quartet from the Choura of Quetta.
Also present was Asif Zardari, so it was a meeting with serious Saudi/Pakistani presence, in addition to the Karzai and his (armed) critics participants.
Gleaned from the pages of Le Monde.
Mohammed Haafid, a regular contributor to Al-Hesbah, an "forum affiliated with Al-Qaeda", has published a rare (for Al-Hesbah) commentary on the US election. Mr. Haafid writes that John McCain will "continue the ruinous course of his predecessor, Bush" in the pursuit of war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also writes that attacks against American interests before the election will help push the vote in favor of the Republican camp. "That pushes the Americans to vote deliberately for McCain so that they can avenge themselves on Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda will succeed in exhausting the United States."
(from Le Monde, citing SITE Intelligence Group, and Adam Rasiman, an analyst at SITE.)
It is rather odd we haven't heard from OBL this cycle.
The AP/IHT coverage of the Palin event in Bangor is ... très away. A guy with a NRA cap dancing to the sound track from a decade old Tom Cruise flight flick passes as political coverage.
Yes. There are people like this in Maine, but fairly seriously unglued people dance, barefoot and in their underwear, or in coveralls and boots, to Tom Cruise doing "Old Time Rock and Roll" or "Danger Zone", on either side of the dial. Mainers just aren't that ... bizzare.
Colonel Lawrence Morris announced that he's not pursuing charges against Binyam Mohammed and four other people currently held at Gitmo.
I walked over the dune to watch sunrise over the Atlantic, and did dishes as the sunset into Pimlico Sound.
Between, Ulan Bator in Mongolia re: IETF in Minneapolis, via skype, cities and policy mail to Beijing, a _light_ morning of back and forth doing Cairo planning (Stockholm/Dortmund/Geneva/Barcelona), Arabic Script and IDNAbis mail to write, editing a messages catalog for scripts going into the IDN test in the IANA root, cvsup & build on my Portland rack o'bsd boxen, some security work, posting and mailing out the .blog idea. Mercifully, no more reading myself blind checking Unicode errors in the "American Scripts". Instead, I took Jonah back to the sea where he enjoyed the waves to their fullest, joined by Sam, while Grace and Kezzie built sandcastles.
A day in balance.
That's 1,400 people looking at their last high-tech paycheck for a while.
In a few days ICANN will publish the "Draft Applicant Guidebook for New gTLDs". The announcement was posted on the 16th that the six-module guide will be out for public comment in the next fortnight [two weeks in American English], so by the end of this month.
In those six modules will be the final (but not the final-final) rules of the game for people like me. And it occurred to me that not only do we benefit the blogosphere (y!sktp!) blogtopia (y!sctp!), first of course, by simply blogging, but also by holding the Koufax Awards (in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, and yes, in 2008, before MB turns into a law school mushroom), for the left-hand side of the US-centric (but not US-only) political blogging dial.
We could also drop an application, a competitive application, for ".blog" into the ICANN new gTLD hopper.
Here are the rules of the game. First, it has to be useful. Not yet-another-chase-Verisign's-pot-o'gold thang. There's never a shortage of those bogons, in every ICANN new gTLD round, and oddly enough, none have actually caught and killed the leprechaun.
Second, it costs some money. Some for the application, some for ICANN (and we don't know that number yet, it was $45,000 in 2000), and some for the first year of operation until the money bloggers pay for their blog's names covers expenses. I really do have the numbers, and they are well within the ballpark. Nothing heroic is required. Think of it as a normal House race budget. Without the TV buys.
Third, the "where does the money go" question needs an answer. Regardless of the corporate form, a Mozilla-style trust, a non-profit, ... the question needs an answer. My answer is feed the registry first, and plow what is left over back into whatever made the need real in the first place, so profits back to "blogging", whatever that may be, from year to year. Funding better tech, legal defense, etc.
Finally, in the rules of the ICANN new gTLD game, proposals with a community win over those with none, and you can all be sure that somewhere some .com bubble: next generation speculator is planning to grab ".blog", line up investors, and milk it for all it is worth and then some.
I can do pro-bono, but it has to for something real, something the Koufax community wants.
Ideas:
Comments are the canonical place to place comments.
I wouldn't know it from the US press, but Asharq Al-Awsat reported that last month Afghan government representatives met Taliban leaders in Mecca. Hamid Karzai's conditions for talks with the Taliban are that they accept his government's constitution and are not involved with Al-Qaeda.
Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki isn't particularly partial to Euro-American negotiation with the Taliban.
I'm amused that the term of art for the Afghan Talibans is now tending towards "militias". Eventually we'll think about Afghanistan as rationally as we think about Lebanon. With something other than a local shopping and vacation export industry.
Date: October 18, 2008
From: Robert R. Bryan, lead counsel, San Francisco
Subject: U.S. Supreme Court developments concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row
U.S. Supreme Court There are new developments in the case of my client, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on Pennsylvania's death row, that are the most significant and deadly since his 1981 arrest. The prosecution has advised the Supreme Court that it is seeking reversal of the federal decision which ordered a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Earlier I made an appearance in the court on our ongoing effort to win an entirely new jury trial on the issue of innocence, so that Mumia can be freed.
We are now at the crossroads of the case. This is a life and death struggle in the fight for Mumia’s freedom. His life hangs in the balance. The following are details as to what has been occurring in the Supreme Court.
Abu-Jamal v. Beard, U.S. Sup. Ct. No. 08A299 On October 3, I filed in the Supreme Court a Motion for Extension of Time To File Petition for Writ of Certiorari. Justice David H. Souter granted the motion on October 9. The Petition is now due on December 19, 2008.
The issues I will be presenting on behalf of Mumia include racism in jury selection and the prosecutor’s misrepresentations to the jury during the guilt phase of the 1982 trial. These were denied last spring by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Philadelphia. Abu-Jamal v. Horn, 520 F.3d 272 (3rd Cir. 2008). The court was split 2-1 on the racism question.
The prosecution’s use of racism in selecting the jury is a strong issue because of the powerful dissenting opinion by Judge Thomas L. Ambro. In voting that relief should be granted, he wrote that “[e]xcluding even a single person from a jury because of race violates the Equal Protection Clause of our Constitution” and concluded that “everyone is entitled to a fair and impartial trial by a jury of his or her peers.”
A major problem we have encountered is that Mumia’s previous lawyers neither developed essential evidence nor raised some issues of constitutional significance. Such failings are inexcusable. For example his attorneys during the period 1994-2001, failed to even get the racial composition of the panel from which the jury was selected. They had the jurors’ names and addresses, and could have gone out and obtained this information in a day. Once the case went up on appeal it was too late to introduce this crucial evidence which would have established beyond question that African-Americans were underrepresented on the jury panel and that the prosecution used discriminatory racial practices in jury selection. Justice Ambro pointed out in his dissent that this deficiency should not serve as a basis to deny relief in view of the other evidence we have of prosecutorial racism. Another issue concerning the judge's racism and prejudice at trial was doomed from the start because it was not even presented by the previous lawyers. Rather, they only argued that the judge was unfair 13 years later at a 1995 evidentiary hearing. It was an incompetent mistake that waived this strong issue. Sadly, Mumia is bound by the errors of those lawyers.
Beard v. Abu-Jamal, U.S. Sup. Ct. No. 08A315 The Philadelphia District Attorney is seeking reversal of the federal court decision which granted a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Their intent is to see Mumia executed. That was announced in an extension motion filed in the Supreme Court. The court ordered on October 14 that the government petition must be filed by November 19, 2008. We will then submit briefing in opposition to the death penalty arguments.
Abu-Jamal v. Pennsylvania, U.S. Sup. Ct. No. 08-5456 In a ruling not related to the present litigation, the Supreme Court on October 6 issued an order denying the petition we had filed seeking review of a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. That concerned the denial of a new trial based upon the fact that the prosecution persuaded witnesses to lie in order to obtain a conviction and death judgment against my client. This arises from adverse rulings by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. The District Attorney successfully argued that Mumia’s previous lawyers had failed to raise the misconduct issues in a timely manner. Even though this evidence of fraud is not before the Supreme Court, I will certainly be able to use it at a new jury trial.
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense Due to the developments in the Supreme Court, the legal defense for Mumia is in dire need of funds. The legal costs will likely reach $100,000. To help, please make your checks payable to the “National Lawyers Guild Foundation” (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). These donations to Mumia’s defense are tax deductible, and should be mailed to:
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
Conclusion More activism and support is needed in the campaign to free Mumia from the death penalty and prison. It is an affront to civilized standards and international law that he remains in prison and on death row. We must have hope and fight for justice.
Yours very truly,
Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
RobertRBryan@aol.com
Today I looked over the NREL's 20% plan and I wondered just what had been thrown away this month in the Bush/Obama bailout. Turbines run about 100k, so roughly 700,000 were lost to not do anything curative or substantial, other than ensure Democrats look better than Republicans, in Congressional and the national campaigns.
Three quarters of a million state of the art wind turbines.
via Suburban Guerrilla, an interview with Anna Schwartz.
Smith Cogeneration Management, Inc, of Oklahoma City, OK., was incorporated in 1986. It's SIC #Code:8741. According to data provided to Dunn and Bradstreet, the estimated annual sales:$730,000 with an estimated headcount of 12, presided over by Donald Smith.
This was the corporate entity which formed Quoddy Bay LNG, also an Oklahoma corporation, and just reading their FERC filings makes me giggle at the unreality of it. A dozen guys making three quarters of a million per year in sales were going to find the capital to do a LNG buildout at Pleasant Point and run 36" pipe out to Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline, and pay M&N to add an additional 300 miles of pipeline.
The FERC declined the joke today.
I'm glad we're not that close to the Passamaquoddies. They could have done just as well themselves and not been skinned on the margins.
We call this "Abenaki Castle", but it has another name. Half an hour ago a "senior administration official" (that would be Secretary Poulson) announced a meeting.
We're in Ocracoke, just south of Hatteras, being pyrates and feeding mosquitos.
This, includes this:
Note the lack of trailing ASCII junk. That's the point of getting our scripts into the ICANN IDN test. The texts read "http://example.test". Exercise left to the reader: Generalize.
In Cairo I'm finally going to have scheduled ICANN minutes to speak about Indigenous Intellectual Property, the set of issues lacking from ICANN's original WIPO-2 IP framework. Finally. It was just last Spring (of 1999) that Bob Gough and I put this effort together.
[Goodness, I'd not yet walked out of Nokia Research, trying to get Nokia interested in name spaces for mobile devices and physical location as a network semantic -- a fancy way of saying that I wanted to buy tax-free in the 20 minutes it took me to get from Maine to Massachusetts. Now both are no-thinkums and the GeoPriv activity in the IETF is almost ten years old.]
The context is new generic top-level domains, if for cultural and linguistic purposes, what are the ways to make the senior rights of cultural custodians and language users prevail over the claims of corporations that have expropriated (stolen) words and built mass marketing around those stolen words? Who wins? The CNO+UKB+ECN or Chrysler, LLC? Who gets "Cherokee"?
Similar issues arise for cities as top level domains, where we're innovating this time around. Does the Times Corporation "own" all references to Times Square? Does whoever owns the Chrysler Building (unlikely to actually be a CAFE avoiding, muscle car, SUV and heavy pickup truck, auto manufacturer) also own all common spatial references that are relative to the Chrysler Building?
Rinse and repeat for regional top level domains, where we, and others, are innovating this time around. Which government (in Africa) can prevent the regional .africa registry from using geographic identifiers? Who "owns" the Nile or the Sahara? Naturally, there are governments ready to assert the obvious.
Anyway, the point isn't that I get to speak at ICANN, I do that all the time. The point is that with the Intellectual Property Constituency observing, I and others are going to be articulating the IP policies that are going to be in applications for linguistic and cultural, municipal, and regional applications, which will change ICANN's IP "law", relative to both trademark and government claims of priority.
As if that weren't enough fun, I've spent the past two days ruining my eyes reading Cree and writing Cherokee, with the goals of (a) once again preventing a standards body from banning Cherokee, and (b) being certain that "finals" (which is where the Y-Cree vs Th-Cree ... fun begins) aren't affected by a "labels MUST NOT (begin|end) with combining characters" rule, which is to say, the w-dot and dot-w problem plus the generalized finals problems, all made harder by Unicode having used the Canadian Government's "Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" project, for which I kick myself, having been present at the point of error and having thought it a very, very good thing (tm). All the Dene characters (several variants), the Inuktitut characters, the Cree characters (more variants), the Siksika characters (oki kokona!), plus some Ojibberish, are all smushed together into a glyph catalog in UCAS (now Unicode), making reading the standard reference for any specific language absurdly difficult.
You are in a maze of twisty passages that all look alike. This is what the Unicoders did to Chinese, on a significantly larger scale, with "Han Unification". Perhaps printer vendors are inherently evil, how else to explain their indifference to text-as-characters, not puddles of fungible glyphs, to be compressed so that dingbats and other bits of dreck will fit into factory installed ROM? They managed a 21% reduction in memory necessary to put Cree et al fonts on printers. Odd people to have handed over all human language to. Mercifully, that cabal will be brewing over a fire in California the week we actually struggle over IDN policy in Cairo. Competing clans of Neanderthals.
This bus stops at Minneapolis a week after the Cairo meeting, and there is a strong dependency as ICANN "consumes" a revised "International Domain Name (in Applications)" standard, and the IETF IDNAbis WG may, eventually, produce yet another work of profound brokenness.
I thank my stars I'm not responsible for Korean, as that's the whipping boy of the moment. In 2003 the Chinese were the people the standards bus ran over, and carefully backed up to run over a second time.
13A0..13F4 ; PVALID # CHEROKEE LETTER A..CHEROKEE LETTER YVThat's what success looks like. One line in a table. PVALID, not DISALLOWED, for the entire range of the Cherokee codepoints in Unicode.
1401..166C ; PVALID # CANADIAN SYLLABICS E..CANADIAN SYLLABICS CAROnly the Xtian "cross" symbol and the w-dot fix for punctuation, the little "x" sentence terminator character, are disallowed. Yes, I did kill Christianity. Proud of it. But making sure of the leading, and trailing dot and other "terminators" is the cause for my temporary blindness.
166D..166E ; DISALLOWED # CANADIAN SYLLABICS CHI SIGN..CANADIAN SYLLAB
166F..1676 ; PVALID # CANADIAN SYLLABICS QAI..CANADIAN SYLLABICS N
I can't express how absurd it is to have to scan over lines and lines of texts in all Northern languages in all scripts and writing conventions, to ensure that one code point has the associated semantics correctly defined, and that a rule intended to cure a defect in the Unicode algorithm for "dot" as a sentence terminator when "dot" is used as in infixed label separator in domain names, at least does no harm to Cree and other languages' writers and their readers who use syllabic rather than roman characters. If I hadn't killed Christianity I'm sure my reward would be "in heaven". The obverse is obvious.
Writing in Cherokee is hampered by the fact that the Unicode notion of the script isn't the CNO's notion of the script, and every time I write "do", instead of a "V" I see a lambda. That's a bother, and I suspect there are others.
The wayback machine found this bit of old cree-l at nisto for me:
Date: 7 Jul 1997 14:58:34 -0400How time flies.
From: Eric Brunner <(suppressed)@opengroup.org>
Subject: Re: Making computers that work in Cree
Oliver Hirschbiegel's film, for which we have Oliver Stone's W, has been recycled over at YouTube to tell the last days of Fortis. Wicked popular in Liberated Europe, probably not so much in Occupied America.
A pod of dolphins, perhaps 10 animals. And after several kilos of shells collected and brought to show-me show-me before going into the carry-bag, a lump on the beach. A horseshoe crab, direct from 445 million years ago. We watched it move back down into the water and Gracie did stand-up biology to Sam and Kezzie. I'm not sure what Jonah made of it. He would have picked it up, and I really should have let him.
When De Gaulle came to Quebec, it was to tear off a piece of Canada. Times have changed, and after Reagan, and Bush, and Bush the size of the bite has changed.
Sarko has come for Canada. All of it.
The really important question is not what to do about Canada leaving NAFTA and joining the EU, its how can we in Maine can join Europe too.
Le Monde has a series of images, unfortunately in flash, showing the global economies. In green are those nations with a rate of growth equal to or greater than the average for 2003-2008, pink those with a negative rate, relative to the average, and red those with a 20% or greater negative growth rate.
In 2006 there is some red -- Saudi Arabia, Chad, Algeria, Zaire, and a sprinkling of smaller African states, and the pink bits are Brazil, Venezuela, another sprinkling of African states, Mongolia, and South East Asia to Oz.
In 2007 the US goes red, turning Mexico pink, the reds and the pinks in Africa swap a bit, and South East Asia and Oz go green.
In 2008 the US and the world goes pink, except for Canada, which goes red, and most of South America and North Africa and Central Africa, which green.
The forecast for 2009 is a red world, China and West Asia are pink, with green only in North Africa and Central Africa and some scattered isolates elsewhere.
Sorry no link, flash is evil.
He was appointed to the USSC on August 3rd, 1994.
In 1994 Obama had not yet run for any elective office in Illinois.
The whole "litmus test" segment of the debate was a debacle Obama could have defused simply by pointing out that he didn't vote for, or against, Stephen Gerald Breyer, and getting USSC facts straight really is important.
At least for the charge of planning a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack on some imaginary bit of the US -- the sea coast of Iowa perhaps, or the mountains of Florida. His torturers tried out lots of scenarios, and the "dirty bomb" scenario was the one their political masters found did the best with the focus groups.
By dropping the charges based upon torture, the USG hopes to avoid ever having to actually having to produce evidence that it has used torture to fabricate perpetrators and criminal intent.
Only four more months until regime change.
Two women, Elín Sigfúsdóttir and Birna Einarsdóttir, are set to become chief executives of New Landsbanki and New Glitnir respectively.
Meanwhile, in Obama Retail Political Koolaid Land, the drones are still going on about how clean the campaign has been, well, their campaign has been.
As nice as the margins look now, we'd still be doing a lot better up-ticket and down, with Hilary and Obama, with the strident, partisan political policy message about saving an economy pillaged by those guys.
It was a good call, improved as my co-workers managed to mention ever-so-casually, no,with considerable hilarity, by the fact that I was unable to figure out how to unmute the Mac Book's audio, and was able to listen only (and type like mad in the associated chat channel) to the weekly call I hold. We concluded the technical discussion of an important project and I typed in the final text and the message "champagne!"
Wrapping up I checked the markets. The up-swing in the Dow was already over. No "black Monday" and a total of 1.5 trading days "up" was all the European and American incumbent regimes had managed. And in France, the key to the European plan, the Socialists and the Greens were abstaining on the vote to approve, and the Communists were voting against. Not enough pubic return on an "investment" in the private banks.
Nope. Not enough. Just two weeks ago Paulson was messaging that if he didn't get his $700,000,000,000 there would be a 2nd Great Depression by Monday. Ignoring the comedy of McCain's heroic flight to Washington (did he toy with dice before crossing the Potomac?) and real news this morning is that a (singular) member of the Governing Board of the Fed, Janet Yellen, used the "r" word in Palo Alto a couple of hours after I sent "Champagne!" to my co-workers.
The truth-to-fiction density is way too low. About this point two cycles ago the Dems in Congress, then a minority party, voted against the worst bits of NCLB, and made it a bi-partisan thing. The conventional wisdom was that when the Dems were back in the majority the whole NCLB nightmare could be unwound. Well, its taken a bit longer than the CW of that moment envisioned, and California's evasion tactic of doing 3% per year the first years, followed by ballon payments of 14% per year, in the fond hope that the note would never be called, is now bearing its toxic, bipartisan fruit.
The financial deal cut now, rob the public now, with similar expectations that we can unrob ourselves later, may be just as fictive.
It would be a whole lot nicer to point at NCLB and say that only a couple of Dems voted for that insane package of profound ignorance and anti-learning, and vote it, and the Bush Wars, into history in January. How will Dems sell a better plan post-January? "We didn't want to lose the general election, we didn't trust the independents to vote against being robbed with a pen, so we signed on to No Banker Left Behind, and now we can do serious, necessary, and unpopular (with the R and U demographic) stuff."
Nikki of Democratic Gain writes what she thinks is a funny:
After months of 80 hour weeks and no days off, you vow to NEVER work Field again...and after a week in the 'normal' world, you send your resume out and start it all over again.To me, the substitution of the "martyr lifestyle" for the metrics of campaign exeuction -- number of calls made, all the stuff we do by rote, is a dead end. And the Field staffers that work 8 days a week don't have time for basic life stuff, like laundry.
In the top-three DCCC campaign MB staffed the field organization for in central Ohio, the FD was very drunk more nights than not, and he and the CM and the CD, two ODP guys who knew each other in DemClub, and who otherwise didn't bring a lot of campaign experience to the campaign, did shooters and "strategy" more nights than not, into the wee hours.
So there was no organization, and genuine vols and paid field workers showed up mornings, on the dot, to not get trained by those boozers, and not have call sheets, and not have the basic tools to do their jobs, right down to not having their walking lists for doing doors and their call lists for phone canvas. Tremendous waste repeated 6.5 days a week for 12+ hours/day is simply a whole lot of wasting goin' on.
You'd think that a pay-me-to-list-jobs board for campaigns would celebrate competence, not "... you fall asleep at the wheel driving to a campaign event".
MB was kind enough to pick up a copy of Mearsheimer and Walt's book-length work. I'm in heaven. "The Plan" of keeping it to read while on travel (from Hatteras to Cairo, and return) is of course doomed. I managed to read the entire Harry Potter opus (then extant, v1-v5) while trailing Jonah as he explored the shores of Lake Superior on his trike, so its beach reading for those hours when he's treating himself to sand play.
Also on the read-before-burning list is Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt. To read before getting to Cairo.
This is not particularly edifying. Moroccan army units have intercepted groups of people walking through the mined frontier (recall, the US vs USSR proxy war between Morocco (US client) and Algeria (USSR client) for the bit of Spanish colonial history called "Western Sahara") and has transported some (from Mali and Senegal, the most numerous) to air evac points, and has turned around the remainder and told them to "walk back to Mauritania" ... through the mined area.
Because of the .eh (no, not a Canadian joke, the "country code" for Western Sahara, a bit of over-ripe fruit Algeria and Morocco still bat at) fiasco at the IANA, I know more about this than is decent.
Jonah and I were Indigenous Today. I got him into his trunks and a swim shirt ("tribal surf") and we crossed the dunes to the sea. Yesterday's scary seas (I eventually ordered the boogie boards in and restricted Gracie, Sam and Kezzie to wading and splashing and building sand castles in coils) were calm, and the boy enjoyed the full embrace of the sea. Every few minutes I'd wave him up current, back to the center of the bar and away from the escape channel, and other than that, we'd the beach to ourselves.
He is still the spiting image of the boy on the cover of Time a couple of years ago, the fingers and the head tilted to see something otherwise difficult to perceive are all it takes to make the diagnosis. A lot of smiles and singing the lyrics to Arthur as wave after wave gave him the beating he craved, until, at last, cooled in the early November Central Atlantic, we walked back to our camp.
I hope you all had a good ID as well.
Outstanding!
A medida que se acerca la fecha de las elecciones presidenciales, los dos candidatos a la Casa Blanca intensifican sus campañas para captar al mayor número de votantes. Este domingo, el demócrata Barack Obama, al que la mayoría de las encuestas conceden una holgada ventaja sobre John McCain, ha hecho campaña en la localidad Holland en Ohio, un estado en el los republicanos han ganado en las dos últimas elecciones. Obama ha cambiado en esta ocasión los mítines y los actos de partido por una visita a las casas de un barrio de la localidad para pedir a los ciudadanos que le voten el 4 de noviembre. Muchos de los vecinos no pudieron disimular su sorpresa al abrir la puerta y encontrase con el candidato demócrata, en persona, pidiéndoles su voto.
It really should be easier than going to papers in Spain to find a picture of Senator Obama doing doors. Pity doing doors is news now. It should have happened in Ohio two weeks before early voting began, first in the Columbus zip code that is purged every year, and then in every colorable CD in the state.
Tomorrow starts with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland, the Lloyds-TSB deal being toast, going under, and 6 hours before the western European markets open, the futures markets are down 10%.
The photo was taken yesterday, when two Spanish freighters were lost, without loss of life.
I think we've found the Homeland Security Vital Fluids Aspiration and Anti-Coagulants Test Range. According to the (exsanguinated) locals, its the worst in a decade. On the up-side, the mosquito density is less than 1 per cubic centimeter of air, so the atmosphere isn't completely saturated, and further atmospheric mosquito uptake is possible. Water isn't lacking either. The adjectives "torrential" and "stair rods" came to mind, in the few moments when thought surfaced from the hammering.
A box turtle came to visit. A cute little female about 4 inches long. Catch and release. Crabs. Popping out of holes and running wicked fast and popping back into holes. A northern racer drew a black line through camp and did something I've never seen in any serpent -- it raised its head up nearly a foot to look at the noisy simians. Another first, a kingfisher sighted flying parallel to shore, out in what I think of as the Pelican's Highway, but not bothering to surf like every religious pelican.
Jonah had a hard time getting to sleep, and even asked for sleepy medicine (melatonin, or benedryl), but he and I still ended up doing a couple of hours out in the truck until he was calm enough to sleep in my lap, at which point we came back in and slipped into bed. We've been out of trailer now for two months, between Columbus and Avon, and its an adaption to go back to $10/day rent and all the constraints that follow.
Slightly unfair, but generally, is it?
The right and the socialists voted down both proposals.
MB turned to me and asked "Was that a good answer?" I answered "No."
A good answer would start like the answer to a question about Kurds in Iraq. Somewhere in the scope of the statement and the recitation of capability and intent would be "Kurdistan", a non-state occupied by Turkey, Iran, Syria, Armenia and Iraq, and the relationships, variably based upon power projected by the state, and consent based upon advantage.
There is a reason why the Autonomous Areas are Autonomous, and there is the history of the integration of Baluchistan into British India, and the division of the Pashtun region into Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani state, the Punjabi state, is obsessed with the extent of the state's writ. The Punjabi political classes, civil and military, pursue a policy towards the non-Punjabi political classes that ranges from assassination to military occupation, and from time to time, political compromise. Whatever the United States thinks it is doing in the Pashtun and Baluchi and Sindi ares of Pakistan, hunting OBL, eastern containment of Iran, or naval facilities for regional logistics, it is "in" the center-periphery, the Punjabi-non-Punjabi balance of forces, and usually uncritically aligned with the Punjabi political classes, civil and military.
For US goals to be implemented, that is, no "safe havens", pervasive "strike anywhere, strike anytime" has to be as real as the military selling the solution claim, and maintained indefinitely, or the safety of the havens eliminated by the local forces. The "blow up Mullah Omar to get Bin Ladin" approach has been tried, and both are still capable quasi-state actors. We haven't tried "build up Mullah Omar to get Bin Ladin", which the Punjabi elites don't want India or the US or Iran or Russia to try, for any minor Mullah Omar equivalent, in its "Pakistan".
At some point, the US has to be for local government by means other then foreign forces, in particular Punjabi forces constituting Pashtun government. The US has to get out of being "pro-Karachi" (and being "pro-Tel Aviv") and get pro-progress, and not tilt the local balances of forces to temporary, unstable, non-federated, non-negotiated, dominance-by-firepower solutions.
So no, Senator Obama doesn't have "it" yet, under his plan, the US will continue to send money to Punjabi state to continue its attempt to reduce non-Punjabi autonomy within the fractions of the non-Punjabi states -- Baluchistan and the Pashtun-i-stans (note the plural, some are in "Afghanistan").
Which subordinates whatever the US goals are to the hegemony of the Punjabi elites.
The Belgian health care now includes dental care in the package.
Free, to age 18.
Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:
ALASKA ETHICS PROBE REPORT: GOV. SARAH PALIN UNLAWFULLY ABUSED HER AUTHORITY
Inappropriate pressure. Just what the Cheney Profile requires.
I called Grace over from putting jam on a toasted muffin and said "Sit down. Watch. It's history." That it was the Rehnquist Appointee was not material. That he was momentarily lucid, or not, I didn't care. I wanted her to see the thing, to be able to remember, without filtering, mine or anyone else's, the thing.
The AT&T branded copy at MIT's cutely named "New York Talk Exchange" (is it crashing too?) is as follows:
World Within New York shows how different neighborhoods reach out to the rest of the world via the AT&T telephone network. The city is divided into a grid of 2-kilometer square pixels where each pixel is colored according to the regions of the world wherein the top connecting cities are located. The widths of the color bars represent the proportion of world regions in contact with each neighborhood. Encoded within each pixel is also a list of the world cities that account for 70% of the communications with that particular area of New York.
No mention of intercept, "legal" or otherwise, but this, not pillow talk between consenting US nationals in South West Asia, is what ABC could be reporting. After all, the ABC brand isn't compromised by coverage of the AT&T brand.
If you can't see the NYTE logo at the upper right, click on the permalink, the color-to-country legend is not to be missed.
Saleh Al-Ogaïdi was engaged with a vehicle mounted munition. He was one of 32 members elected from the Sadrist movement. Collateral blast effect, seven other persons killed.
ABC is running a multi-pager on SatPhone intercepts against targets in the Green Zone and elsewhere, and predictably the ABC's coverage centers on things like phone sex between consenting US national adults, rather than a tentative timing cross correlation between things that went wrong and resources spent on getting "intelligence" on phone sex.
A background read is Steve Peacock's piece on his blog.
Wicked dumb priorities, not to mention compromising the IRC and MSF and others, which is worse than dumb, we need them not just now, for this pissing contest, but as on going institutions, independent of the best, and the worst, US politics.
It was an interesting hour yesterday, watching the Alister Darling (nice tie), the present Chancellor of the Excheqeur, explain that government was going to take an equity stake in the institutions after all.
The idea will make it across the pond in a day or two.
If so, please drop me a line. Its an application I used briefly a decade ago and I've been asked to give a talk using it on something I think of as progressive policy. Basically, I want to be able to have bullet points or ordinary text, beginner ppt stuff, with some urban transport maps as a transparent background. The version of ppt I have is the 2008 version for the Mac.
Thanks in advance!
That's who in knows Senator McCain is more hat than horse, more like the boy from Kenebunkport and Crawford in talk and non-accomplishment than unlike him.
I'd no idea until today that his current wife is deranged, in some place stranger than usual for First Ladies, somewhere proximal to Joe McCarthy's HUAC, with even fewer rules.
What has me puzzled is the number of Op-Eds in the Indian press that argue for engagement in the American political process, and argue for neutrality, or disinterest or non-identification with Party. We, Mary Beth and I, had effect in the 2004 primary, we organized Howard Dean's defeat, not in the early, non-Indian primaries, but in Oklahoma, Washington, where 3rd place finishes finished the candidate with an anti-Abenaki record.
We didn't gamble on winning a delegate or two in South Dakota. We didn't mistake a candidate coming to a reservation for a photo-op, for the earned media, for the national coverage, the ordinary execution of politics, as having local policy consequence in the future.
I don't know what the early decision ballet will be in the next cycle. I thought I did two years ago when three of us, painfully, worked out the DraftGore2008.org political strategy, but I obviously didn't anticipate the collapse to the front of the schedule, and the long tail of essentially meaningless evenly accumulating contests, including primary contests in red states.
I don't think its useful to wait for the accident of party and primary to bring a deciding contest to Indian Country. I also don't think its particularly useful to bargain between parties, at least not during the general. To bargain between the parties means we Indians are not part of a "we" that includes non-Indian Hispanics, and non-Indian Asians, and non-Indian Africans, that we face the English without allies, without the descendents of others enslaved.
Locally it is a balance of local elites, but nationally the contest is a compromise of complexes, and the long struggle has been to keep the locus of conflict as far away, as compromised by competing claims, as Rome, or the Courts of the European Crowns. New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Ottowa are the best we've done, but this is still vastly better than submitting to local state and provincial elites, uncomplicated by the complexity of treaties with other capitals.
To work with effect, we have to find where our means have effect. Its in the early contests, off-cycle and on, and its not where the Op-Eds in the Indian press are currently pointing.
And John McCain just contained the disclosure of the Abramoff set of clients, he could have made a difference any time in the past decade, and just used the Select Committee on Indian Affairs as dressage. A mere prop.
This is actually the best thing I've read as a Sec Def Gates quote. I don't care what his present opinion of Mullah Omar is, nor to I particularly care if he has reason to think some of the losers of the pre-2001 balance of forces that composed the government the United States went to war with in October 2001 are now winners -- Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami and Jalaluddin Haqqani's group in Waziristan.
This is the closest any member of the Bush Regime has come to the policy envelope articulated by Gen. Wesley Clark.
Sec. Def. Gates is about a week behind NWFP Governor Owais Ghani, which is reasonable for public statements.
Before the market opened in New York I watched Governor Palin in Florida. I thought the market would fall below 10,000 at open, it took 30 minutes. In Germany Hypo went under while I watched the sunrise, and I spent 90 minutes on the phone, late afternoon, CET, with my co-workers on technical subjects unrelated to the market, though we are affected by the Euro to Dollar rate, as our income is mostly in Dollars, and our expenses mostly in Euros. Iceland will default. Fortis, nationalized only at the beginning of the weekend was split and 75% of the portion held by Belgium was just acquired by BNP Paribas, making it the largest bank in the Euro zone. Germany, Erie and Denmark have guaranteed all bank deposits.
So Governor Palin said some stuff, I expect she didn't make the financial pages.
I received this from Dave Johnson, who, if I recall correctly, started blogging the same month as I did, six years ago. He's working the Election Protection Wiki, and asks for assistance to spread the word. From their press release:
CMD Launches The Election Protection Wiki A Dynamic Website Helps Safeguard America's Right to VoteContact:
Conor Kenny, Managing Editor, Election Protect Wiki
Phone: (202} 277-6427; Email: conor@sourcewatch.orgThe non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has launched a unique website to help safeguard the fairness and integrity of US elections, using the power of citizen journalism. The Election Protect Wiki is now online at http://www.EPWiki.org . It enables citizens, journalists and government officials to actively monitor the electoral process in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. CMD and its community of volunteer editors will continue to improve, expand and update the EP Wiki beyond the upcoming November 4th election.
The EP Wiki is part of CMD's award-winning SourceWatch website and operates on wiki software which allows anyone who registers on the website to participate in creating and updating articles. SourceWatch contains in-depth articles on every member of (and most candidates for) the US Congress at http://www.Congresspedia.org . CMD employs both professional and volunteer editors who work together online to ensure articles are accurate, fully documented and fair.
Recent presidential elections were marred by controversies and disputes. Scores of individuals and organizations have been working to investigate and reform US elections, issuing reports and information on topics such as electronic voting machines, voter suppression campaigns and student voting rights. However, this information is spread across many different websites, news sources and databases. The Election Protection Wiki seeks to provide a single web portal for accessing this disparate information. Its information is non-partisan and factual; anyone of any political persuasion will be able to access and use it to protect every American's right to vote.
Of stealing Indian rights, use red tape:
They gave us 60 days to object to the changes. The notice to remove “improperly included property” arrived after an oil lease had been signed and a well site had been staked on the land - where the Fort Berthold Reservation and the entire region are in the throes of an oil boom.My sister called to tell me about the letter, since she was the only person who received a copy from a probate judge in the Office of Hearing Appeals in Billings. With a stroke of pure luck, I was going to be at Fort Berthold the next day. It would give me time to check into the matter at the local Bureau of Indian Affairs agency office. It turned out, I needed all 60 days.
Now, though, the Interior Department plans to shorten probate-related deadlines to even quicker 30- and 15-day time frames. That includes review periods for improperly included property, appraisals, rehearing petitions, rehearing decisions, purchase options and summary probate decisions.
...
I've been thumbing through the pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, titles 25 and 43, dense volumes that guide executive departments and federal agencies in governing the lives of millions of Native people.
The regulations aren't easy to understand.
Anyone who understood existing regulations should be braced for sweeping procedural changes. “Twenty-five CFR worked for a long time; to change it that dramatically, a lot of individuals don't know what changes are about to be made,” said Helen Sanders, an original allotted landowner on the Quinalt Reservation in Washington. “You can't react to something you haven't seen.”
Comment periods were extended at least twice, said Liz Appel of the Interior Department's Office of Regulatory Management. The new regulations should be given final approval by Nov. 1, she said. They will then be posted on the Federal Register.
It wasn't easy to make the department's current 60-day deadline. It took more than 30 days just to get estate documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Fort Berthold.
Death by a thousand paper cuts.
My LSATing is complete, my applications are on their way, and I've left the Kilroy campaign (for reasons which will be disclosed after Election Day). So it's time to return to our regularly scheduled blogging. It'll be relatively light, as I still have a backlog on .nai work, but I hope to get back up to speed, and give Eric a well deserved breather.
And for the record, yes, I am voting for Obama, despite his many blemmies.
Today when the Dow drops below 10,000.
Just after 10 am. I'll try and get the precise time.
First degree murder charges brought in a federal court against John Graham for the execution of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash were dismissed on Friday. The reason for the dismissal was simple. While Mr. Graham is a member of the Southern Tutchone First Nation, and Ms. Pictou-Aquash was a member of the Indian Brook First Nation, neither belonged to an Indian Tribe recognized by the United States, therefore, while the crime originated on the Pine Ridge, jurisdiction lies with the State of South Dakota.
No "full faith and credit". To make a colorable claim to federal jurisdiction for the killing of an indian by another indian from a nexus in indian country, in the universe created by Bill Rehnquist, the US Attorney has had to file a new complaint, arguing that both Graham and Pictou-Aquash were affiliated with the Olgala Lakota Sioux tribe as AIM members, and as an alternate jurisdictional theory, that Pictou-Aquash had married an enrolled Lakota member in a traditional ceremony, and therefore became "an Indian". If the US can't claim that either Mr. Graham or Ms. Pictou-Aqquash are "Indians", then the US, Bill Rehnquist's US, can't prosecute the murder.
While comedic, the import is that protection from political violence targeting Indians is conditional, and that political violence against Indians who are members of tribes terminated by the United States, or not currently recognized by the United States, will not be provided by the United States. Crimes against Indians other than members of Federally Recognized Indian Tribes are left to the states.
In effect, the bounty period for members of "extinct" tribes lives on, with Federal protections, such as they are, waived for Indians not members of currently recognized tribes.
Note well Indians north and south of the US, and east of Alaska. Cross the line and your "Indian" is "killed", while your "man" or "woman" is "saved".
Bill didn't just invent rape tourism, he invented semi-permiable mental membranes that let "Mexicans" and "Canadians" cross the border, but kills "Indians" on contact. From the crypt he's managed to nullify the Jay Treaty.
The Secretary of Lieberman's Mess mentioned he envisions a defensive system that "would literally, like an anti-aircraft weapon, shoot down an attack before it hits its target." Unfortunately, he wasn't referring to coastal batteries ready to target shoals of irksome jellyfish, but something to do with the innertubes. The intellectual wreckage is here -- CNN Junk Tech: Homeland Security seeks cyber counterattack system
An NANOG contributor wrote my first reaction to Chertoff's statement is that the antiaircraft barrage already exists, is called Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3, which is sufficiently fanatical on my machine that its uninstaller committed suicide.
Naturally, the Secretary of Lieberman's Mess did not mention the fact that 9 out of 8 computers in the Microsoft monopoly market zone have been, are, or will be, attack assets of anyone who decides to use them.
Tina Fey is so good at doing Palin that it is possible people will vote to prolong her routine ... first as Vice President Goober "Gams" Cheney, then as President Evita Aw Shucks II, well into the 'teens.
She's pretty much a gift from doG to the professional comedians, like LBJ's face to the political cartoonists.
According to the Agence France Press, two Blackhawk UH-60 helicopters collided while landing at Adhamiyah (north of Baghdad). At least one Iraqi soldier was killed and two American soldiers, as well as two Iraqi solders were wounded. There were combat operations in the area, but the collision is not attributed to hostile fire.
Maine voters approved Dirigo in 2003, and the program provides health insurance to about 18,000 people, some of whom are on Medicaid. Because it was implemented in phases, we were already on travel when the phase that would have benefited us (health insurance via Wampumpeag, our business), and the coverage for Sam and Jonah arises from Section 5090 of the MaineCare Eligibility Manual ("Katie Beckett"), so we're not beneficiaries of Dirigo, just advocates for it. The annual budget for Dirigo runs to $48 million.
The state legislature approved taxes on beer, wine, soda and flavored drinks would add 16 cents to a six-pack of beer and 11 cents to a liter of soda, and a $4/gal tax on syrup used to make soda. In response, the beverage distributors and retailers, together with the permanent anti-tax business lobby collected signatures to put this on the ballot:
Do you want to reject the parts of a new law that change the method of funding Maine's Dirigo Health Program through charging health insurance companies a fixed fee on paid claims and adding taxes to malt liquor, wine and soft drinks?
Interestingly, the "Yes" campaign (beverage distributors and retailers, together with the permanent anti-tax business lobby) is messaging the "No" position in part as a rejection of a regressive tax policy. Newell Augur, who chairs "Fed up with Taxes", said
This is literally, absolutely the worst time to ask Mainers to pay more for everyday items."So, boozers for progressive tax policy, and it is possible (in theory) that he supported the 2003 measure to increase taxes on fur coats in storage and yachts and other not so everyday items.
On the "No" side the message is framed as a sin tax, Gordon Smith of the Maine Medical Association writes:
Increased pennies on beer, wine and sugared drinks is a much fairer way to fund health coverage than the current funding.We don't know why he thinks pennies on bottles of beer, wine and sugared drinks is fairer, or why the current funding is unfairer, but he put "sugared drinks" in the mix with beer and wine, and makes the link between consumption (cause) and medical costs for avoidable illness (effect). So, medicos for regressive tax policy, and it is possible (in theory) that the MMA was for the single greatest expansion in service and reduction of cost -- single-payer.
I suppose I should call these guys and ask. I plan on voting "No" on Question 1, though I wish the legislature had distinguished between micro-breweries, and mega-breweries. Still, a good beer, not just 3.2% plus industrial grade flavoring and water, is worthy of its hire, and if it weren't for carbonation, no one but insects with a weakness for treacle would drink darkened corn syrup.
Seventy men died when the Grunion sank near Kiska in the Aleutians. The Pacific Fleet lost 52 submarines and more than 3,500 sailors in the Pacific War. The hull is lying at a depth of about 3,200 feet. The can I did my ASW tour in the central Pacific was built four years after the Grunion was lost.
A military command and control target appears to have been engaged with a vehicle mounted munition, and early reports are six dead, four wounded.
Update: Seven dead and the blast equivalent of 20 kg of TNT. Wounded medivac'd by to military hospitals in Russia.
Update: Ivan Petrik was among the dead. He was the Chief of Staff of Russian forces in Ossetia. The number of wounded is now seven also. The detonation adjacent to the office of Colonel Petrik appears to have been incidental to the seizure of civilian vehicles found containing weapons, and simply unfortunate rather than a planned. If so, the necessity to inflict measured, proportionate cost on Georgian military or state targets is absent. Source: Kommersant.
Update: The dead now number eleven, eight of whom were Russian military peacekeepers, including the Chief of Staff, Colonel Petrik. The Georgian theory of the event is that the Russians blew up their own GHQ to provide an excuse not to execute a movement order and exit South Ossetia.
Its been a quarter century, Dukakus/Bentsen, Clinton/Gore, Clinton/Gore, Gore/Lieberman, Kerry/Edwards, and Obama/Biden, since a woman has been selected by the nominee for his running mate. Governor Palin's debate with Senator Biden was historic, and long after everyone else has moved on, women working in electoral politics will be watching reruns to review the nuances of camera, framing, dress, face, leg, podium and person to see how a woman, noise of politics, party and policy ignored, performed in the top-end of the visual media theater against the standard, a man.
Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton's name was not mentioned once, by either of the three performers (the moderator too is a performer, though the role of interviewing men in politics has been open to women in journalism for some time). I suppose all three had their reasons to think no question, and no response, and no independent point, could be usefully advanced containing a reference to a woman who accumulated 18 million votes earlier this year in early contests within a political party represented on the stage by a man.
Governor Palin's vision for herself in the Senate, 2009 through 2113 was interesting, though coming after the disaster of the Cheney Vice-Presidency, particularly the claim of joint executive-legislative branch status of the office following a series of claims for the expansion of powers of a unitary executive, her view of her self may be lost in the quasi-constitutional journamalisms. Does she want to speak from the well of the Senate on some issue of the day? Does she hope for a Senate in which tied votes are more frequent? Does she want to be the equal to her predecessors, Vice President Cheney and Vice President Gore, and be more than an observer to the workings of the West Wing and the Cabinet?
Then there is the 2011 question. If Senator McCain is elected, and he declines to campaign for the nomination of his party, as he has said he would, will she compete, with the advantages of the incumbency, for her party's nomination? Was the subject of elected succession as the head of party mentioned by either Governor Palin or Senator McCain, when they came to the agreement that has produced the McCain/Palin ticket in 2004? Has Senator McCain offered to support, as the incumbent president, his vice-president, prior to the deciding early contests for their party's nomination, in 2011?
Senator Biden could have mentioned his 2015 ambitions, presumably retirement in 2017, and made the absence of a reasonable question stand in place of an answer not offered. I have a hard time envisioning a long-term planner like Senator McCain, or a young and ambitious Governor, ignoring the subject of "what next" and agreeing just to get through the month of October and a few days of November, and then making long-term commitments.
Senator McCain's campaign is moving staff to the 2nd CD, in the fond hope that he can pick up one electoral vote there. I don't think they noticed that Representative Michaud voted agains the bailout that Senator McCain has so closely identified his campaign with. They're not going to help Senator Collins either by bringing the Wall Street Welfare Act to the other Maine.
What a gift!
Angela Merkel chats with Dimitri Medvedev. How much longer will the Atlantic Alliance last? Will future historians write that the Rehnquist Regime managed to lose not just a series of wars, like the Indo-China wars a generation earlier, but the dollar as the currency standard and the alignment of Europe? Angela Merkel is freer than any Mitteleuropa head of state since the Kaisers (Wilhelm and Joseph), to treat with any. I look at my watch and it reads "Pre-1914".
Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko sold Mikheil Nikolozis dze Saakashvili almost half of the Ukraine's inventory of Buk-M1 medium range, and 200 Strela and IGLA man-portable air defence missiles, as well as some T-72 main battle tanks and 122 mm multiple-launch rocket systems. The former is a serious concern for figuring out who Yushchenko really is, as sending half the Ukraine's medium range air defense off to start a hot war is indicative of risk taking, capabilities and intentions. The later interests me because someone sent me assertions that the Russians were using MLRS on Georgian civilians. I don't think MLRS have any use at all, but knowing that the Georgians sought and bought an inventory of BM-21s is worth knowing. I know I saw them used in footage from the days when the Georgians were conducting offensive operations.
So, Yushchenko's Ukraine in NATO? Sure, if you're looking for someone who has already started a war with Russia, he'll do just fine. And I don't even want to go back to thinking about Air-Land and RoRos and all the old problems and solutions.
Apropos of nothing I found out why I was in the USANORTHCOM media conga line. They use a service and my name popped up. Maybe they'll take a question. Maybe not. I sent them one.