Tuesday Open Thread (Obamate my tires)

The Pentagon unveils a new career saving robot

It appears that Mary-Kate Olsen likes to use "powerful painkillers."

In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,

looks to remain that way until end of September.

I know you're all crushed =)

I'll be back to enjoy the craziness leading up to the election.

Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson

why does House Democratic Leadership deny the will of most members of the House, the Senate, and obviously their Nominee who all support the comprehensive bipartisan Senate plan that allows for some more offshore drilling, focus on renewables, and other decent energy policy. Pelosi has hijacked the country and is preventing anything from being done about our Energy crisis.

I already answered this question in response to Red_Wing, but I'll say it again.

Why does the Senate Republican Leadership continue to filibuster bills that deny the will of most members of the House, the Senate, etc., etc.? The obvious answer is that the bill is politically unpalatable to the minority, so they will use any tools at their disposal to keep it from being passed.

Even then, I disagree that a majority of the House and Senate support the plan of which you speak. In the House a majority of members can sign a discharge petition to get any bill onto the floor without a rule or committee report. In the Senate anyone can bring up legislation via a motion, but it is considered "rude" to do so unless at the behest of the majority leader.

The only thing that is stopping either house from passing the bill of which you speak is either tradition or not enough votes. You'll have to figure out which you think is more important.

I'd even argue that the Republicans don't want this bill to be passed. They aren't using the methods I outlined above to circumvent the leadership because using this issue to beat Obama over the head is useful to them. It's certainly more useful than actually having a bill passed.

I never broke the law; I am the law! -- George W. Bush Judge Dredd
I'm listening to...

Then check out what's going on down South--Tennessee's 9th district is 60% black yet is represented by a white Jewish man. This same guy, Cohen(D) has tried to petition for membership to the CBC but was denied, well..you know why right? Anyway, he's up for re-election in a primary against a young black corporate lawyer named Tinker (D). They've pulled out all the stops--complete with political ads showing KKK images and burning crosses. No, I'm not kidding.

If even half of what I've heard about Tinker previously is true, I hopes she gets trounced.

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Via Secrecy News

The President would no longer be able to secretly modify or revoke a published executive order if a new bill introduced in the Senate yesterday becomes law.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, responds to a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion that was revealed last year by Senator Whitehouse on the Senate floor. According to that unreleased opinion, “There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous Executive order. Rather than violate an Executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.”

What this means is that any published executive order may or may not actually be in effect. It may or may not correspond to the legal framework that governs the executive branch. The public has no way of knowing.

“No one disputes that a President can withdraw or revise an Executive Order at any time,” said Senator Feingold yesterday. “That is every President’s prerogative. But abrogating a published Executive order without any public notice works a secret change in the law.”

“Worse,” he said, “because the published Order stays on the books, it actively misleads Congress and the public as to what the law is.”

To remedy that problem, the new bill requires notification of any change.

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

again via Secrecy News

A bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and several Senate colleagues last week would “end coercive interrogations and secret detentions by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“These practices have brought shame to our Nation, have harmed our ability to fight the war on terror, and, I believe, violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations,” Sen. Feinstein said.

“Our Nation has paid an enormous price because of these interrogations. They cast shadow and doubt over our ideals and our system of justice. Our enemies have used our practices to recruit more extremists. Our key global partnerships, crucial to winning the war on terror, have been strained,” she said.

“Look at two of our closest allies in the world. The British Parliament no longer trusts U.S. assurances that we will not torture detainees. The Canadian Government recently added the United States to its list of nations that conduct torture.”

“This is not the country that we want to be,” Sen. Feinstein said.

The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Rockefeller, Whitehouse, Hagel, Feingold, and Wyden.

Have I mentioned that I like Sen. Wyden (D-Oregon)? He's kind of a policy geek, not that that's a bad thing in a senator.

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

The 2001 Anthrax mailings may have finally been solved. Or maybe not. A principle suspect commited suicide last week and the FBI claims that they were within weeks of indicting him for the crime.

On the other hand disturbing suggestions that this is a matter of finding someone to blame, rather than actually solving a crime, are raising questions.

From the NYT:

Dr. Ivins had been a respected microbiologist for three decades at the United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. He was a popular neighbor in Frederick, Md., a Red Cross volunteer and an amateur juggler who played keyboards at his church.

But the investigators found some personal quirks, according to law enforcement officials and people who knew the scientist well. They found that Dr. Ivins, who had a history of alcohol abuse, had for years maintained a post office box under an assumed name that he used to receive pornographic pictures of blindfolded women.

Years ago, he had visited Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, an obsession growing out of a romance with a sorority sister in his own college days at the University of Cincinnati — although someone who knew him well said the last such visit was in 1981.

Salaciousness aside, those personal habits seem distinctly unconnected to the actual crime. Even if they fit an FBI profile (and nobody so far has suggested much less demonstrated that they do) that is still circumstantial.

What is more relevant, agents focused new attention on a 2002 Army investigation of a spill of anthrax the same year outside the secure laboratory that Dr. Ivins worked in, and his puzzling behavior in trying to clean the area with bleach while failing to report the contamination. They studied his anthrax vaccine patents and considered whether the promise of royalties after a bioterrorism scare might have been a motive. They noted that he had a lyophilizer, which could be used to dry wet anthrax into powder, a form not ordinarily used at Fort Detrick.

This also seems thin. I can say definitively that it is difficult to get people to report spills of even dangerous chemicals because of all the rigamarole involved, and I'm working in a corporate environment not the much more strict government labs (much less working with anthrax, although some of the stuff here is pretty lethal).

Here's where it gets a bit more worrisome:

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

Another former co-worker, Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, who collaborated on anthrax research with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s, had a similar theory.

“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure,” Dr. Hedlund said. “It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don’t believe he would have done what they say he did.”

With such views voiced by Dr. Ivins’s acquaintances — and vocal skepticism from key members of Congress — the pressure is growing on the F.B.I. to unveil its evidence.

I'd like to believe tha FBI has acted in good faith here, but after Brandon Mayfield, the various DoJ politicization that has leaked out over the last four years, and the general culture of outright criminality that Bush has brought into the executive office, I'm having a hard time giving them any benefit of the doubt. The FBI needs to put up.

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

Ron Suskind's new book claims the White House ordered the FBI to forge a letter indicating a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda:

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Kevin Drum notes that this would certainly fit the pattern:

The White House, of course, adamantly denies Suskind's story. Coincidentally, though, the Daily News reports that the FBI received similar treatment after the 2001 anthrax attacks:

In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda....Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide. "They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.

Add to this the uncontested fact that George Bush once mused to Tony Blair about flying fake UN planes over Iraq to try and create a pretext for war, as well as Seymour Hersh's revelation that Dick Cheney recently discussed similar kinds of schemes to foment war with Iran. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe all these sources are just making stuff up. Maybe. But that's a helluva similar pattern of allegations, isn't it?

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

Paris Offers Her Advice for an Energy Solution

Oh My!

It is the economy, stupid.

Obama criticized John McCain today for taking a page out of “the Cheney playbook” on energy.

Really?

Obama said, “President Bush, he had an energy policy. He turned to Dick Cheney and he said, ‘Cheney, go take care of this,’” Obama said. “Cheney met with renewable-energy folks once and oil and gas (executives) 40 times. McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook.” …

Oh ya Barack? LOL!

Obama himself voted for that 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, the measure Cheney played a major role in developing.

What's even funnier!

McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry…

Obama dug his hole even deeper, “We have to end the age of oil. “Obama said. “If we fail to act, there are severe indications for national security, our economy and our environment.” …

Obama seems to have a very spotty memory, which is not a good thing for such a BS artist.

Though, it is not something the media ever call him on.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." ~ B. Goldwater

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