Brainiac Conspiracy

Sadness in Wingnutville

The spiritual mentor of 21st-century Republicanism has passed away. And no, it's not Billy Graham.

---Vitelius

Back to the Salt Mines . . .

The Baron has blown back into town after nearly a week away from his castle . . . and heck, it's the longest respite I've taken from this blog since I started it last summer. I hadn't planned on it, it just worked out that way.

One thing that got me out---and I mean completely out---of my usual state of Obsessive Bloggerhood was a weekend spent in a remote locale in northern California: A chateau-style getaway house with no TV, no computers, no Internet access . . . just spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the city silhouetted on the horizon beyond. Well shucks, for the first day I thought I would go mad. No daily dose of Josh Marshall and Steve Benen? No Greenwald or Ariana? What on earth would I ever do with my free time? Well, how about taking a walk in the woods, or a drive along the beach, or simply sipping a glass of red wine on the veranda, watching the fog roll in at sundown and forgetting about politics and presidents for awhile? It's hard to remember sometimes that we all did have a life before the blogs and the Web, and it really wasn't too terribly long ago. And sometimes, as I found out last weekend, it's a good thing to get one's priorities re-oriented, to simply get away and spend a few days recalling a place when we all seemed to have more time on our hands to devote to leisure, to dreams, and to plain-ol' linear thought.

By Monday, though, it was time to shift gears and catch a plane to Nashville for the kind of corporate shindig that I dabble in from time to time to keep the rent and utilities paid, the Typepad monkeys happy, etc. In a span of 24 hours I went from zoning out in a hillside hot tub surrounded by Monterey cypress to a bigwig dinner with some automotive executives, among the Jim Press, co-CEO of Chrysler. Naturally, I had a thousand questions at the ready for him, about the future of the industry and Chrysler's long-term plans and how they plan to deal with five-dollar gas and alternative fuels and changing buyer habits and so forth. And you know what? For the better part of an hour, Jim Press was asking me---yep, the Baron---what I thought his company needed to do, what consumers were thinking, how their long-term buying and driving habits would change, and what kind of vehicles his company needed to be building over the next five to ten years. Obviously, the subject of hybrids and biomass and compacts and crossovers came up, but the most important thing I could think of to tell him was: tell the board members not to panic. We've been down this road before---in the early '90s, and through most of the 1970s---and the companies that figure to survive the recession are the ones that'll take a big-picture view of the problem---beyond the last week's Dow or the next quarterly earnings statement---and use it to draw up a long-term plan of recovery based on reasonable expectations, and stick with it. The price of oil will eventually stabilize, and within the next few years, Americans will gradually adjust their lifestyles to accommodate hundred-dollar fill-ups. And once that happens, they'll start looking to buy big and wasteful vehicles again. Because, well, we're Americans---that's just the way we are. In the meantime, though, the companies that succeed will build small and build smart.

Now, of course I am certain that Jim Press knows all of this already----he was an executive at Toyota for nearly 30 years, after all---but it certainly spoke volumes of the man's humility, as well as his willingness to seek out other points of view, that he spent nearly his entire dinner hour brain-picking myself and assorted other scribes in attendance for their views on the myriad problems confronted by the industry. (Memo to Obama: if you're recruiting candidates for next year's ambassador corps, consider me available. The embassy in Rome would be a fair assignment, though Paris or Amsterdam will suffice in a pinch.)

But enough of this gay banter. No more heart-warming human-interest crap---the Baron is back. Bring on the outrage, otra vez!

---Vitelius

Snake Eyes

Another day in the life of a straight-talkin' Man of The People®:

The event will be held at the Southern Highlands Golf Club, one of Vegas' most exclusive neighborhoods and home to three of the luncheon's hosts---casino resort mega-developer Steve Wynn, MGM Grand CEO Terry Lanni, and Republican media consultant Sig Rogich. Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson, one of the world's richest men, and Sands CEO William Weidner are also listed as hosts on the invitation . . .

At today's event, high-rollers who contribute $33,100 will get a private audience with McCain at a special "roundtable private discussion" at Rogich's home located next to the club's private 18-hole golf course. Donors must pay a minimum of $1,000 to attend the main luncheon, $2,300 for a photo with McCain, and $10,000 to attend a VIP reception.

---Vitelius

Classic Old Stories, Made New Again

I'm a sucker for stuff like this:

Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey ("Theoclymenus's prophecy") to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the decade-earlier sack of Troy around 1192-1184 B.C.E. However, much skepticism remains about whether the verses refer to this, or any, eclipse. To contribute to the issue independently of the disputed eclipse reference, we analyze other astronomical references in the Epic, without assuming the existence of an eclipse, and search for dates matching the astronomical phenomena we believe they describe. We use three overt astronomical references in the epic: to Boötes and the Pleiades, Venus, and the New Moon; we supplement them with a conjectural identification of Hermes's trip to Ogygia as relating to the motion of planet Mercury. Performing an exhaustive search of all possible dates in the span 1250-1115 B.C., we looked to match these phenomena in the order and manner that the text describes. In that period, a single date closely matches our references: 16 April 1178 B.C.E.

Which would be the same day that this happened:

Then Mercury of Cyllene summoned the ghosts of the suitors, and in his hand he held the fair golden wand with which he seals men's eyes in sleep or wakes them just as he pleases; with this he roused the ghosts and led them, while they followed whining and gibbering behind him. As bats fly squealing in the hollow of some great cave, when one of them has fallen out of the cluster in which they hang, even so did the ghosts whine and squeal as Mercury the healer of sorrow led them down into the dark abode of death. When they had passed the waters of Oceanus and the rock Leucas, they came to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, whereon they reached the meadow of asphodel where dwell the souls and shadows of them that can labour no more.

Reading the latest research on Homeric poetry brought back a powerful schoolhouse memory. It happened when the Baron was a young sprout---well, okay, a public high-school student---way, way back in the latter stages of the Nixon administration. The class was a senior course in English Composition, yet neither the students nor the teacher composed essays or exams for it. The teacher wasn't even a "teacher" in the conventional sense---he was the school's tennis coach, for godsakes, who had to spend so many hours teaching something besides tennis every year to keep his credentials valid. The class had but one assignment for the entire semester: To read one single book----The Odyssey, yep, the Fitzgerald translation---and we read it aloud, line by line and verse by verse, from start to finish for 18 straight weeks. Along the way, of course, we'd pause every few verses for lengthy discussions of the story, its historical and mythical components, its use of rhyme and metaphor, its depictions of character and its dramatic devices. While this could be a daunting and sometimes tedious task in a class full of 25 kids, the longer we stayed with it, the more rewarding the experience became for all of us, and when the class concluded in June, more than one student expressed the regret that we couldn't spend another 18 weeks reading The Iliad the same exact way. In terms of teaching us to be critical readers----and more critical thinkers, by implication---that high-school English class was far more engrossing and insightful than any literature class I subsequently encountered on the university level, and it left me with a lifelong love of language, for its myriad shadings and nuances, and with an equally strong distaste for writers who misuse language to manipulate and exploit an unwitting audience.

It's also a powerful reminder of the ability of public education to teach, instruct and influence kids for a lifetime, the next time you hear some GOP gasbag pontificating on the virtues of charter schools and vouchers. Most likely, you won't need to wait very long.

---Vitelius

About That Economic Stimulus Check . . .

D'ohhhhh!!!!

About $2 billion in economic stimulus rebate checks are being confiscated to pay overdue bills for child support, student loans and back taxes, the government says.

So far, 1.8 million rebate checks have been intercepted by Treasury Department computers showing that individuals owe money to federal or state governments.

---Vitelius

Soldiers in the Global War On Terra (Firma)

So, how's that audit of the Endangered Species program going over at Interior?

Sorry, bub, that's classified.

---Vitelius

Birthday Wishes

Cheers on 64, ex-Yardbird. This is just sick, sick playing for a geezer. Or anyone else, for that matter.

---Vitelius

Easy Answers to Daunting Existential Questions

Will Pro-Choice Women Back John McCain?

No.

---Vitelius

The Banality of Politicization

Boy, we've got a doozy this afternoon---the latest in-house investigation of politicization at the Justice Department, released today by AG's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility. You can find it here at the DOJ website.

The investigation focuses on the Attorney General’s Honors and Summer Law Intern Programs for recent law-school graduates. The culprits this time are Mike Elston, chief of staff to Deputy AG Paul McNulty, and Esther MacDonald, an associate AG counsel. There's also a whistleblower---a career prosecutor, as you might guess, named Dan Fridman who served on the screening committee that vetted applicants for the programs along with McNulty and MacDonald. Among this gang, Fridman was the only non-political appointee.

The saga starts with the initial DOJ audit, a department-by-department analysis that uncovered some unusual trends in the intern and honor student selection process:

For example, in trying to determine why 49 of the 53 SLIP candidates the Antitrust Division had chosen were deselected, Antitrust personnel conducted Internet searches on some of the candidates. They discovered that one, a Harvard Law School student with good grades who had graduated summa cum laude in economics from New York University, had worked for Senator Hillary Clinton, while another candidate had a MySpace page on which someone had posted an unflattering cartoon about President Bush and Vice President Cheney. These results, along with the absence of any explanation from the Screening Committee for the large number of deselections, led to speculation in the Antitrust Division that the Committee had considered political affiliations . . .

Similarly, following deselection of 28 of 74 of the Tax Division’s SLIP candidates, a senior Tax Division attorney reviewed all the candidates’ applications and wrote in a memorandum analyzing the deselections that she was “unable to identify any legitimate reason the students were deselected.” The attorney concluded that all but one candidate who had worked for a Democrat were deselected, while all candidates who listed connections to Republican Members of Congress or the White House were approved. The attorney noted, for example, that in one case, a student who was in the top 5% of his class at Cleveland State Law School and who had worked for Congressman Kucinich was deselected, but the Division was permitted to interview another Cleveland State student who was only in the top 20% of the class but whose application did not identify any particular political experience or leanings . . .

A senior attorney in the Civil Division’s Appellate Branch conducted an analysis of the 59 candidates that were deselected out of 135 candidates that were submitted by the various sections in the Division. The senior attorney wrote that, as the approval and deselections of SLIP candidates trickled out in the fall of 2006, a pattern emerged that became impossible to ignore: candidates who had worked for [Democrats] were uniformly rejected, notwithstanding some with outstanding qualifications. In fact, 12 of the 13 candidates on the Civil Division’s list who had worked for a democratic senator or representative were rejected. . . . In addition, 4 out of 5 candidates who had worked for democratic state legislators were rejected.

Fridan, who gave ample testimony to the IG's investigation, provided more specific and anecdotal details. Some examples from the report:

Fridman said McDonald also circled or otherwise identified items on candidates’ applications about which she apparently had concern, such as membership in certain organizations like the American Constitution Society, having a clerkship with a judge who was perceived as a liberal, having worked for a liberal Member of Congress, or having worked for a liberal law school professor. Fridman said the general thrust of McDonald’s written objections were to people who had an “activist view” of the law or DOJ’s role in helping laws to evolve. He said that it appeared from McDonald’s notations on the applications that her concerns about candidates’ affiliations led McDonald to put their applications in the questionable pile, regardless of whether they had good grades or had attended a top law school. Fridman said that he considered only the candidate’s grades . . .

This next one is truly remarkable, as an assistant counsel at the US Attorney General's office expresses open contempt for laws her department is tasked to enforce:

In the November 29 e-mail, McDonald wrote that three of the eight candidates were “Unacceptable” based on her objections to the candidates’ ideological affiliations. She objected to one candidate on the basis of the organizations he belonged to and to statements in his essay that she considered “leftist.” She wrote in the e-mail:

Poverty & Race Research Council actively works to extend racial discrimination through increased affirmative action and, while there, [the candidate] helped draft document arguing that federal law requires recipients of federal funding to seek actively to discriminate in favor of minorities (racial, language, and health) rather than merely to treat all applicants equally; Greenaction is an extreme organization founded by Greenpeace members and promoting civil disobedience and engaging in violence in protests, and the organization adheres to the Principles of Environmental Justice, which are positively ridiculous (e.g., recognizing ‘our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth’ and ‘oppos[ing] military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms’); [the candidate] also is/was a member of Greenpeace; [the candidate’s] essay is filled with leftist commentary and buzz words like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice.’ . . . (Emphasis added.)

Gee, guess there haven't been a whole lotta affirmative actions cases filed lately,eh?

In the e-mail, McDonald noted that she deemed another candidate unacceptable because the candidate was “active in ACS.” Fridman said that he believed McDonald was referring to the American Constitution Society, an organization that was intended to be a progressive” counterpart to the more conservative Federalist Society. However, we determined that this candidate’s application did not mention his membership in the American Constitution Society or ACS. Fridman said he believed that McDonald must have obtained this information from the Internet . . .

In the November 29 e-mail, in voting no for another candidate McDonald also noted, among other things, that the “essay also states that she wants to work for DOJ to ‘have more of an impact on the judicial system.’ DOJ’s purpose is not to impact the judicial system but to enforce the law . . . .” In the same e-mail, McDonald found another candidate questionable because of the candidate’s grammar, writing style, and grades, but noted: “In her favor, she refers to wanting to work for DOJ to fulfill her goal of ‘enforcing the law.’ Leftists usually refer to achieving ‘social justice’ or ‘making policy’ or anything else that involves legislating rather than enforcing.”

Okay, how about a paper trail---the aspiring interns' applications themselves? Well, heh heh, this being the Bush crime syndicate Administration, they don't exist anymore.

Elston’s staff assistant told us that [MacDonald's] office did not have room to store the hundreds of applications and, because they contained personal information about the applicants, she placed them in the burn box for destruction shortly after the review process was completed in early 2007. The staff assistant said she did not recall consulting Elston or anyone else before destroying the applications.

Esther MacDonald (surprise, surprise) declined to be interviewed for the IG's report. And Mike Elston? Of course, he don't know nuthin':

We showed Elston many similar applications of highly qualified applicants with either liberal or Democratic Party affiliations who had been deselected. Elston said he could not recall these applications and could not explain why they had been deselected.

A bit later, though, Mikey warms up a bit and takes a stab at a few, er, reasons for disqualifying certain applicants:

We asked Elston why he denied the appeal of a SLIP candidate who was a student at Stanford Law School, an editor on the Stanford Journal of International Law, President of the Stanford International Human Rights Association, and had graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University. Elston said there was nothing familiar to him about the application so he could not explain why he did not approve it. However, on reading the applicant’s essay when we showed it to him, Elston said that he had a negative reaction to her statement that working for the Department would stimulate her conscience as well as her brain and allow her to work on cases that she cared about. Elston stated:

[T]hose kinds of things [in essays] strike me as being, as being an indication that this person views it all right to put their own judgment about what’s right and wrong ahead of what the law, or, or policy requires
. . . But it’s just not the job of a line career attorney to, you know, decide in a metaphorical sense what’s right and wrong . . .

Translation: Brain in Justice = good. A moral code? Less so.

We asked Elston why he denied the appeal of a SLIP candidate who was a student at Yale Law School, a member of the Yale Law Journal, a Rhodes Scholar, a Truman Scholar, graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, interned with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, had researched national security and terrorism issues for Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman, and had worked for the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, the Coordinating Council for Children in Crisis, and the Legal Services Organization’s Trafficking Clinic. AAG Keisler had sent Elston an mail indicating that this candidate was the top priority among all those SLIP candidates that the Civil Division was appealing. Elston said that this candidate “looks like a perfectly outstanding candidate, although she doesn’t say much in terms of essay that would give us a view as to why she’s interested in public service.” Elston said he could not recall why he did not grant this appeal and that he would have granted it at the time of his interview with us. Elston noted that the date of the e-mail exchange with Keisler discussing this candidate was November 24 and “by this time I was really tired of these things.”

There's a dedicated civil servant for you:

We asked Elston about an appeal he denied of a candidate who was a student at Georgetown Law School with a 3.08 grade point average, who graduated in the top third of his undergraduate class at Georgetown University, and who had worked for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The candidate selected the Criminal Division as one of the components he was interested in, stated in his essay that he had “always wanted to be a prosecutor,” explained that his interest had been heightened by his friendship with the victim of a sexual assault but that his interest in prosecuting was not “limited to rapists,” and included a paragraph that spoke highly of the role of the U.S. Attorney. Elston denied that the candidate’s work on the Kerry campaign had any negative effect on his decision. Rather, Elston said that one of the reasons he did not grant the appeal was because other than selecting the Criminal Division as one of the components he was interested in, the applicant “didn’t express an interest in the Criminal Division.” Elston stated that his essay was not sufficient to express an interest in the Criminal Division because the Division “doesn’t prosecute sex offenders” and “does very different things than U.S. Attorneys’ Offices.” Elston also said that his grades were not impressive and that he used too many exclamation points (we found three on the three-page application), which was a “pet peeve” of Elston’s.

At this point, the IG report calls rampant bullshit:

We note that Elston’s statement that the Criminal Division does not prosecute sex offenders is incorrect. The Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Criminal Division prosecutes violations of federal law related to producing, distributing, receiving, or possessing child pornography, transporting women or children interstate for the purpose of engaging in criminal sexual activity, and traveling interstate or internationally to sexually abuse children. In addition, this Section has jurisdiction to prosecute cases of child sexual abuse on federal and Indian lands.

And the IG's conclusion? Laws were broken:

Based on the results of our investigation, we concluded that McDonald committed misconduct and violated Department policies and civil service law by considering political or ideological affiliations in assessing Honors Program and SLIP candidates. However, we believe the most significant misconduct was committed by Elston, the head of the Screening Committee . . .

As explained below, we concluded that Elston violated federal and Department policy by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations. First, the data analysis indicates that highly qualified
candidates with liberal or Democratic Party affiliations were deselected at a much higher rate than highly qualified candidates with conservative or Republican Party affiliations. Second, Elston admitted that he may have deselected candidates in a few instances due to their affiliations with certain liberal causes. Elston also was unable in specific cases to give a credible reason as to why highly qualified candidates with liberal or Democratic Party affiliations were deselected.

In addition, Elston consistently was unable to provide credible explanations as to why he denied the appeals of the highly qualified candidates who had liberal or Democratic Party affiliations. His proffered reasons were also inconsistent with other statements he made or actions he took. For example, as discussed above, Elston said he rejected two highly qualified candidates with liberal affiliations because he was offended by the appeals submitted by the Division which he thought showed a lack of deference to the Screening Committee.

Give the entire report a read sometime. It's a fascinating look at how a few well-placed appointees can turn an entire apparatus of government into a partisan political organization. Just in case you needed any more evidence. And if these people went to this much trouble to screen out troublesome interns, just imagine how they scrutinized other employees, like, oh, Assistant AGs and dudes like that.

---Vitelius

The Stupidest F@#&%#g Guy in the Newsroom

Hmmm, let's see here. If I read this guy's column correctly, John McCain has flip-flopped his positions on taxes, immigration, the environment, campaign financing, and damn near everything else over the last eight years, but he still has more credibility and character than Barack Obama because he spent five years in a Vietnamese prison cell collecting valuable job references. (Hey, don't ask me what the hell that means---I didn't write it!) Oh, and that the election this fall is only incidentally about the war, and health care, and the economy, and energy policy, and the proper response to the existential threat posed by terrorists, fools and Frenchmen.

Which only leaves me with one little question: who do I need to blow to land a columnist's gig at the Post, anyway?

---Vitelius

Your Tax Dollars (Not) at Work

From today's Post, another sterling example---what, again?---of what happens when you turn over control of your government to people who aren't terribly interested in doing their jobs:

Some U.S. officials acknowledge that they missed early opportunities to disrupt al-Qaeda's communications operations, whose internal security has since been upgraded to the point where analysts say it is nearly bulletproof.

"In many, many ways, the damage has already been done," said Evan F. Kohlmann, an expert on al-Qaeda's online operations who serves as a consultant to the FBI, Scotland Yard and other agencies. "It certainly would have been a lot easier if the U.S. government had taken this seriously back in 2004. Back then, these guys were looked upon as miscreants and cretins, like they were just Internet terrorists and not for real."

Yeah, why would we bother worrying about stuff like that when we have better ideas like this?

Al-Hurra -- "The Free One", in Arabic -- is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission.

Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.

It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!" After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget.

"Many people just didn't know how to do their job," said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. "If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, 'Well, nobody watches us anyway.'"

---Vitelius

"They Don't Eat Properly There"

Calling Werner Herzog: the subject of your next documentary is waiting for you.

---Vitelius

And the Score is Still Q to 12!

From USA Today, more SOP from the Calvinball Administration: When the refs call an infraction, change the rules. Again:

The Bush administration wants to rewrite the evidentiary documents known as factual returns before federal judges begin hearing habeas corpus petitions from accused terrorists who are being held in Guantanamo Bay, according to the Associated Press.

"The government wants to submit new records, which would allow it to add new intelligence and expand its reasoning for holding the detainees," the wire service says. "Since the hearings will decide whether the detainees are lawfully being held now---not whether they were lawfully being held over the past several years---the government wants to provide the court its newest, best evidence."

That's the charitable interpretation, of course:

"It's sort of an admission that the original returns were defective," David Remes, a lawyer who represents some of the detainees, tells the wire service. "It's also an admission that the government thinks it needs to beef up the evidence."

Which also begs the question: What kind of new evidence can you cook up compile against someone who's been locked up in your custody for the last five years?

---Vitelius

The Few, the Proud, the Utterly Unprepared

War crimes: Not just something you inflict on the other guy:

Pvt. David Dietrich had a history of cognitive problems. He struggled in boot camp at Fort Knox, Ky., striking at least one of his superiors as unfit for the military. Dietrich was so slow at processing new things, some fellow soldiers called him Forrest Gump. His squad leader, Pfc. Matthew Berg, says Dietrich couldn't hit targets on the rifle range and had trouble retaining information. "He was very strong physically, but mentally he wasn't really all there," Berg says. Recruited as a cavalry scout, one of the toughest specialties in the Army, Dietrich seemed to lack the essential skills for the job: concentration, decisiveness and the ability to move around without being noticed. He was sent for psychological evaluations at least twice, yet somehow Dietrich advanced---from Fort Knox to Germany and on to Iraq in November 2006. Eight weeks later, at 21, Dietrich was killed by a sniper while conducting reconnaissance from an abandoned building in Ramadi.

What was a guy like Dietrich doing in the military?

That's almost like asking what a guy like Forrest Bush is doing in the Oval Office, but the real answer is, it's all a component of Pentagon policy.

According to records made available to Newsweek, the attrition rate for GIs with health, performance or conduct problems in their first months of Army service has dropped by as much as 45 percent since 2004. In other words, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strain the Army more and more, fewer problem soldiers are getting weeded out in basic training.

And they said Bill Clinton had broken the military . . . Impeach these negligent sons of bitches. Now.

---Vitelius

Snark of the Day . . .

Sometimes, being a court reporter has its good days:

Duke University avoided paying the University of Louisville $450,000 for opting out of three football games, but the school had to trash itself to do it.

Duke's lawyers argued that the Blue Devils football team, 13-90 since 1999, was so bad any Division I team could have replaced them on the Cardinals' schedule.

On Thursday, Louisville's breach of contract suit, filed in Franklin County (Ky.) Circuit Court, was dismissed because Judge Phillip J. Shepherd found the argument used by Duke lawyers too compelling.

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the judge stated in his summary: "At oral argument, Duke (with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty) persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower. Duke's argument on this point cannot be reasonably disputed by Louisville."

---Vitelius

Origins of BushCorp Energy Policy

Well shucks, why didn't I realize this? The only thing wrong with our oil policy
is . . . we need to produce more of it:

The U.S. energy secretary says insufficient oil production, not speculation, is driving soaring crude prices.

Secretary Samuel Bodman's comments Saturday on the eve of an energy summit in the Saudi port city of Jiddah set the stage for a showdown between the U.S. and conference host Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has largely blamed speculation in the oil markets for the record prices.

Now, in the midst of all the hubbub over torture and telecoms, I have to admit I didn't realize we even had an Energy Secretary anymore, so who is this Bodman fella anyway? And where does he come from? Mostly, it appears, from a buncha venture capital firms by way of MIT. Outside the financial sector, his only substantial work history is a stint at the company mentioned here:

In 1987, he joined Cabot Corporation, a Boston-based Fortune 300 company with global business activities in specialty chemicals and materials, where he served as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and a Director.

Hmmm, that's a new one on me. What exactly does Cabot produce, anyway?

Under Bodman's leadership from 1987 to 2000, Cabot was one of the U.S.'s largest polluters, accounting for 60,000 tons of airborne toxic emissions annually.

Lovely. But wait, there's more:

The Cabot Corporation has been involved in the mining of coltan in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Involvement of Cabot in this region has led a United Nations Panel of Experts to accuse corporations (Cabot among them) of being involved in the support of atrocities in this region. Accusations have included bribery of officials, in a business that extracts more than $6 million in raw cobalt from the DRC per day. Specifically, the UN panel accused Cabot Corporation of being involved in "unethical business practices." The UN report further alleges that Cabot purchased coltan from the DRC during the war. While Cabot has denied these allegations, a report by the Belgian Senate states that Eagle Wings Resources International had a long-term contract to supply Cabot with coltan. These actions taken by Cabot were said to be against the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's "Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises", a set of international standards for responsible corporate behavior. The conflict in the DRC, in which warlords and militias have funded themselves by control of the mining industry, has led to the deaths of more than 5 million individuals.

What does this have to do with anything? Not much maybe, except again to remind us of the sterling moral character of the fine Christian men and women in the Bush Administration who are looking out for our interests every day.

---Vitelius

An Unfortunate Sign of the Times . . .

This really, really sucks:

After 52 years, Cody's Books will shut its doors effective June 20, 2008. The Berkeley bookstore has been a beacon to readers and writers throughout the nation and across the world. Founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, Cody's has been a Berkeley institution and a pioneer in the book business, helping to establish such innovations as quality paperbacks and in-store author readings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Cody's was a landmark of the Free Speech movement and was a home away from home for innumerable authors, poets and readers.

The Board of Directors of Cody's Books made this difficult decision after years of financial distress and declining sales.

According to Cody's president, Hiroshi Kagawa, "[It] was a heartbreaking moment in the spring of 2005 when I learned about the financial crisis facing Cody's, I was excited to save the store from bankruptcy. Unfortunately, my current business is not strong enough or rich enough to support Cody's. Of course, the store has been suffering from low sales and the deficit exceeds our ability to service it."

Which begs the question: If a highly literate community like Berkeley can't incubate a prosperous business environment for independent booksellers anymore, what community possibly can?

---Vitelius

News You Can't Get Here

Courtesy of Juan Cole's Informed Comment today, a 23-minute TV interview with a couple of McClatchy correspondents discussing the bureau's herculean efforts at documenting the systematic torture and human-rights abuses incompetence and inefficiency that were trademarks of administration detainee policy at Guantanamo. It's an exhaustive and detailed interview, with viewer phone-in questions as well, and one can only compliment the TV news division that would devote so much air time to so serious a matter.

So, who aired this report? PBS? CNN? C-SPAN? Nope . . . Al Jazeera, who else?

---Vitelius

Why We Play the Lottery . . .

Looks like someone could use a visit from Publisher's Clearing House.

---Vitelius

Friday Night Mecha-Godzilla Rockers Blog

From Open Culture via Matt Yglesias: I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is not Springsteen.

---Vitelius