The Attorney General of Virginia is seeking to craft a new law that complies with Lawrence v. Texas, but also plans to keep the existing law on the books despite the fact that it can’t be enforced. The reasoning is mind-boggling:

Removing the state’s more than two-century-old law could doom pending court cases involving people charged or convicted under current Virginia law, members of the commission said. “The reason we’re going to do that is right now there are several cases working through the court systems in Virginia,” said Kimberly Hamilton, executive director of the Virginia Crime Commission. “The [Attorney General’s] Office is going to deal with that on an appellate level.”

So they can’t invalidate the current law — which has been struck down by Lawrence already — because there are people charged under it? How’s that again?

Well, it’s not quite as absurd as it sounds. The law in question is the same one prohibiting public sex, a prohibition the high court sees as legitimate. Of course, that’s not the only agenda at work. State House delegate David Albo sums it up:

A lot of people don’t agree that certain sex acts should be legal in Virginia. Some people don’t want to capitulate to a decision by the Supreme Court they consider to be completely wrong.

Unfortunately for Albo, the Supremes think otherwise.

The AG does his best to muddy the issue as one of states-rights and an overreaching judiciary; one hopes that few are fooled by such grandstanding:

“The people of Virginia have a right to say that they do not want these acts performed in public and that such acts, if performed against someone’s will, are criminal,” said [Virginia Attorney General Jerry W.] Kilgore in a written statement.

Granted, of course; that public sex may be prohibited isn’t even at issue, and obviously many acts legal for consenting participants become illegal when done without that consent. He’s parading out the most simplistic of straw men.

“As one who believes that the courts are to interpret and not create law, I disagree with the ruling and am always disappointed when a court undermines Virginia’s right to pass legislation that reflects the views and values of our citizens.”

Whatever, Jerry. Any first-year law student should be able to tell you that the right of a state to pass laws that reflect said “views and values” does not mean they may pass laws in violation of the Constitution. What if the “views and values” include second-class status for African-Americans? Clearly, the issue isn’t as simple as laws reflecting the will of the majority. We have a Constitution to protect our liberties even from the tyranny of that majority. Even if you reject the notion of a Constitutional right to privacy (as established in Griswold v. Connecticut, which held that it really was okay to buy birth control), surely the explicit Equal Protection clauses apply.

All quotes from this Moonie Washington Times story.

Tim Noah at Slate thinks so, and he’s got a point. Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich) said last month that someone on the House floor threatened to cut his son’s campaign funds (presumably from RNC) if he didn’t support the bill. Curiously, the DOJ has shown no interest in the case.

Or it at least seems that way. In yet another city, the police attack unarmed protesters with overwhelming force for little if any reason.

We’re in desperate need of Arabic translators in our military and intelligence services.

But only if they’re straight. Think about this for a minute: additional Arabic expertise could very well save lives in Iraq and elsewhere. Better intelligence analysis pre-9/11 could have given us critical and disaster-averting data. We’ve got people trained at the Defense Language Institute (viewed by many as the best language school in the world) who want to serve their country in this capacity.

But in the last 2 years, DOD has discharged 37 linguists from DLI for being gay at a time when we need precisely those skills. Damn, that is seriously fucked up.

The Bush administration demanded heavy secrecy measures on Gen. Wesley Clark’s upcoming testimony in the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. These measures were not in place for the testimony of other high-ranking officials (Madeline Albright, for example). Joshua Marshall wonders if this is intended to keep Clark out of the spotlight, or just another example of Bush & co.’s ongoing contempt for international law.

When the American Library Association and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum agree that something is a bad idea, you know something ugly is being proposed. Check out H.R. 3261: Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act; believe it or not, Schlafly’s commentary is pretty clear on the subject. This is a bad, bad, bad idea.

The Times’ Paul Krugman provides an excellent summary of the Diebold mess thus far (NYT link; use nogators/nogators, and remember it’ll go away in a few days, so read quickly).

President Bush made a surprise visit to troops in Iraq today for Thanksgiving dinner. This is easily the classiest act of his absurd presidency. Good job. I don’t like much that this guy has done, but this is at the top of that short list.

A member of Orrin Hatch’s staff has been suspended for “improperly obtaining” some Democratic computer files that were subsequently leaked to the press. It goes further:

In a related development, The Hill learned yesterday that Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle had hired a renowned counter-espionage and anti-terrorism expert to join the investigation of the alleged theft of internal Democratic documents from a committee computer system. The Hill

Committee Republicans, of course, oppose any wider investigation. I wonder why? Josh Marshall’s TPM has more.

The headline is true: no copyrighted work has passed into the public domain in a long, long time. In fact, nothing copyrighted after Steamboat Willie has behaved as the copyright framers intended and passed into the commons.

Why? In a word, it’s Mickey. Disney and their legislative stooges figure (for the most part accurately) that Americans aren’t paying attention, and won’t mind if they give Disney a few dozen more years of copyright on the Mouse.

The most recent extension, the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, prompted a high-profile Supreme Court case (Eldred v. Ashcroft) that unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) went for Disney.

The folks at Illegal Art have posted a new compilation project, Sonny Bono Is Dead, pointing out that the worst part of Mr. Bono lives on in the gradual loss of our cultural commons. Visit to see what copyrighted works would have passed into our collective ownership had their copyright terms not been extended.

The War on Drugs isn’t now, nor has it ever been, going well. What’s the answer? Well, Canada and other countries are experimenting with decriminalizing pot, for one thing. What’s our response? Federal threats for states that consider medical marajuana, and introducing tough new legislation that makes dealing pot more punishable than some violent crime.

Why is my country insane?

In a shocking move, Diebold has decided not to pursue a DMCA suit against those hosting and linking to its leaked memos. Shocking, but at least slighly encouraging; legal threats such as these shouldn’t be used to stop debate on something as important as our elections.

Slacktivist says some interesting things about the production of ethanol, and whether it represents an ecological opportunity or a boondoggle. It’s worth a read.

Via this Slacktivist post, which summarizes an editorial by RFK Jr.

It’s not just civil liberties. It’s not just the environment. It’s not just our international goodwill and prestige. It’s not just our economic situation. It’s not just the erosion of the barrier between church and state. It’s not just the rightward tilt of the Federal bench. It’s all these things.

Congress has approved a new measure that extends the FBI’s domestic surveilance powers. It was tacked on to an intelligence spending bill.

Congress approved a bill on Friday that expands the reach of the Patriot Act, reduces oversight of the FBI and intelligence agencies and, according to critics, shifts the balance of power away from the legislature and the courts. A provision of an intelligence spending bill will expand the power of the FBI to subpoena business documents and transactions from a broader range of businesses — everything from libraries to travel agencies to eBay — without first seeking approval from a judge. (Emph. mine.) Wired News

Oversight? Checks and balances? What are those? This. Has. Got. To. Stop.

An article in the Washington Post details the orgy of spending the GOP is pushing through Congress before concluding the 2003 session. The deficit is out of control, spending is way, way, up, and revenues are being cut. What part of this is “fiscally conservative?”

The Sacramento Bee has a great article on one of Heathen’s favorite subjects; it’s worth your time. Unless something changes quickly, our voting systems will be crimiinally insecure and unverifiable, with no audit trail. The worse case scenario is not a repeat of Florida in 2000: it’s never having the option to recount or review an election in any meaningful way.

Advance reviews suggest these will be on the form of “those against Bush are for the Terrorists” & etc., just as we’ve seen since 9/11. Slacktivist, as always, has some excellent things to say.

Dennis Kucinich has weighed in on Diebold’s actions w.r.t. copyright law and their leaked memos on his Congressional website.

(In case you’re behind: Diebold memos illustrating that they know how absurdly bad their voting systems are surfaced on the Internet; rather than challenge their authenticity, Diebold has tried to use the DMCA to force ISPs to remove the pages in question in an attempt to coverup their incompetentcy.)

Max Cleland was, until the last election, one of Georgia’s two Senators. A triple-amputee due to wounds sustained in Vietnam, was hounded out of office by his GOP opponent who tried to equate him with Saddam and Osama for questioning some changes made to the Homeland Security bill; there are still some questions surrounding his loss.

Fortunately for all of us, Cleland has stayed active. He wrote an essay for Salon in September attacking the Administration’s failure to plan for postwar Iraq; the essay concludes with “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.” Score one for Max.

He’s also one of the ten commissioners serving on the independent panel investigating the 9/11 attacks — a commission the White House has resisted at every turn for reasons so far unknown.

Today, Salon’s running an interview with Cleland. It’s worth your time, no matter what you think of the war.

The Murdoch-Media is apparently all aflutter over a memo supposedly establishing once and for all that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots, and have been for years, and that we’ve known it all along. Predictably, Murdoch’s machine is all over this, though the rest of the media have essentially ignored the story, and for good reason.

Why? Well, rather than explain it all again here, I’ll point you to our friends at Talking Points Memo (that post and this one)and Slacktivist, who enumerate a wealth of reasons why this isn’t the slam dunk it may appear to be. For one thing, even the Pentagon is saying it’s not proof of a link.

Bush has already commented on the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that struck down that state’s same-sex marriage ban:

“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” Bush said in a statement released shortly after he arrived in London for a state visit. He said the ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “violates this important principle.” “I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage,” he said. Salon coverage

Tom DeLay (R-Tx-Weasel) had this to say, where (unlike Bush) he openly advocates a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage:

When you have a runaway judiciary, as we obviously have, that has no consideration for the Constitution of the United States, then we have available to us through that Constitution (a way) to fix the judiciary.” Ibid

Huh? Where in our Constitution does it deal with marriage, exactly?

The hardline conservatives would have us all rally against gay marriage, because it’s apparently very important that we control what other people do. I’m deeply confused by this; it seems to me to be a blatent case of unequal access to government services for vague and artificial reasons. I’ve no idea how a heterosexual couple might suffer if their neighbors were a married gay couple; to deny them that is simply absurd. Not only that, shouldn’t governmental regulation of marriage fall outside the party-of-small-government’s jurisdiction?

Fortunately, the Massachusetts court majority agrees with me, and not with Antonin “If it were up to me, sodomy would still be a crime” Scalia, et. al.:

Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage, any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race. If anything, extending civil marriage to same-sex couples reinforces the importance of marriage to individuals and communities. That same-sex couples are willing to embrace marriage’s solemn obligations of exclusivity, mutual support, and commitment to one another is a testament to the enduring place of marriage in our laws and in the human spirit. Ibid

Salon has additional coverage as well, focusing in particular on how gay marriage may well become the major domestic issue of the ’04 Presidential race.

Two thirds of a New York Federal Appeals Court have proved very hostile indeed to the Government’s insistence that it may declare someone an “enemy combatant” and thereby detain them indefinitely without charge and without access to counsel.

Bush has pulled out of a planned speech to Parliament, apparently in fear of heckling by anti-war MPs. Nice.

Dan Gillmor notes that 61 Demcorats in the House have cosponsored a bill mandating voter-verifiable paper printouts. The number of GOP cosponsors? Zero. The bill’s still in committee.

The Toledo Blade — and independent, family owned paper — ran a four-part series last month uncovering perhaps one of our bleakest military episodes: the war crimes of the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam. Briefly, in 1967, this unit went on a seven-month killing spree that was by no means confined to “enemy combatants;” they killed unarmed men, women, and children. Salon:

The paper also uncovered for the first time that a secret four-year Army investigation had concluded that 18 members of Tiger Force had committed war crimes, but no charges were ever brought. Instead, the investigation was simply filed away in 1975, during Donald Rumsfeld’s first run as secretary of defense.

Given this, you’d think the story would be all over the national press. Today, Salon wonders why this Pulitzer contender isn’t on a TV near you.

He’s pledging a significant portion of his wealth, and encouraging others to do the same, in order to prevent Bush’s re-election. This Whiskey Bar post discusses his actions in more detail, and the challenges he’ll face once the Rove Machine starts to notice they have a well-funded enemy.

White House security officials are demanding that Scotland Yard effectively shut down central London for Bush’s three day visit later this month.

American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre. But senior Yard officers say the powers requested by US security chiefs would be unprecedented on British soil. While the Met wants to prevent violence, it is sensitive to accusations of trying to curtail legitimate protest.

(Via BoingBoing, who appear to finally have a stable server.)

A high school in South Carolina conducted a drug sweep with local officers — who entered the school with guns drawn, and restrained some students face down on the floor for the duration of the raid. CNN and CBS News are also on the story.

They found nothing beyond the suspicions of K-9 officers that some backpacks had at some point had drugs in them. Or liver treats, I guess. No arrests were made.

Apparantly, “avoiding the surveillance cameras” was one of the things that tipped the administration off to the enormous amount of drug activity in the school. Think carefully about that: it’s basically the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, then why worry about privacy?” argument, and now they’re teaching it in high schools. Good God.

Back in 1998, former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft published a piece in Time called “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” It contained several points that continue to apply today, 12 years after Bush’s famously secong-guessed decision not to roll to Baghdad after ejecting Iraq from Kuwait.

Well, the article — often cited by war opponents in the run up to the new invasion — has been removed from the Time web site. Not only that; the archived table of contents for the issue in question no longer lists the article.

Fortunately, the folks at the Memory Hole have a copy, along with a scan of the original magazine pages. I suppose Time could insist it be removed on copyright grounds, but that would just be creepy, wouldn’t it?

MoveOn has the text of a speech given by Al Gore yesterday. Some choice quotes:

[F]or the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families. President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an “enemy combatant.” Those are the magic words.ÊIf the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment. Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then itÕs almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence Ð because he canÕt talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesnÕt even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as ÒinalienableÓ can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government. How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

There’s also a fine quote from the Israeli high court in 1999:

This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it.ÊAlthough a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. ÊPreserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individualÕs liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security.ÊAt the end of the day they (add to) its strength.

Just a reminder, dear readers. Just a reminder.

A Marine Corps Intelligence Analyst may have been forced out of the service because he has “liberal views.”

I know the military gets to play by its own rules, but this seems absurd. Well, only sort of, now that I think about it; this is also the military that discharged six Arabic linguists last year because, you know, they’re gay, and never mind that whole “we have a shortage of Arabic expertise” thing.

Rumsfeld is having a little trouble with the press; it seems he’s been denying statements he made in the months leading up to the war in re: the Iraqis welcoming us as liberators and Saddam’s supposed WMDs.

Um, Rummy? These guys take notes for a living, and some of them have those newfangled video cameras. Just a hint.

Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the one investigating the Iraqi prewar intelligence and our march to war, which we now see as founded on errors if not outright lies). Apparantly, one of his staff members wrote a memo which “laid out options for handling a report the committee is preparing that will largely focus on weaknesses in intelligence gathering and analysis by the intelligence community.”

The plan, according to this memo, was first to work within the committee, which, as the Post notes, has a strong and unusual history for bipartisanship, in order to explore the allegations and suspicians rampant in D.C. and elsewhere that there was improper or questionable behavior on the part of White House officials.

A second option, the memo continues, is to loudly dissent if the report is too narrow, and “castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.”

Finally, the memo discusses the possibility of an independent, Democrat-only invesigation, “when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority.”

Put another way, it seems to be a contingincy plan for what they can do to encourage an real investigation, which must include White House actions, particularly in light of their ongoing battle with the CIA. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? I mean, after all, it’s completely reasonable for them to suspect that the Majority might obstruct efforts to investigate one of their own, particularly in the climate we have now; the Democrats — and concerned Republicans — should be planning for other ways to get to the bottom of this.

Well, the memo was never approved or formally circulated, but it’s been leaked somehow. Or, perhaps, nefariously acquired by the opposition; Sen. Rockefeller even suggests such an acquisition would have required trash-sifting or improper computer access.

Now, of course, the GOP is hopping mad at this “politicization” of the intelligence process. So horrifying and awful was this memo to Senante Majority Leader Bill Frist that he cancelled all business of said committee, pending an “apology.” Newt Gingrich said yesterday that he thinks the President should refuse to cooperate with the investigation altogether.

That’s just plain bizarre. You don’t have to take my word, or anyone’s word, for what’s actually in this unsent, unapproved memo; the text is available online (at Fox, no less). It’s no smoking gun, and I think my summary above is fair. The GOP’s response to it is frankly astounding, and suggests some very scary things about what such an investigation might find.

Do you see what’s happening here? Josh Marshall does:

The Republicans are trying to protect the administration from a host of disclosures about shenanigans in the lead up to the war. They’ve seized on this memo (which is a bit embarrassing for the Dems, certainly, but hardly more than that) and are trying to use it to secure even further partisan control over the intelligence oversight process — or, in other words, to prevent any serious inquiry into what happened in the lead-up to the war.

The GOP knows, or at least suspects and fears, that the “proof” for WMDs in Iraq never existed, or was based on manifestly inferior intelligence and analysis that the CIA tried to contain (part of their job is to prevent misleading data from setting policy, which is appropriate; this Administration has been rabid for the raw data, and analysis be damned — partly, I suspect, so that PNAC policies could become flesh). They also know what they did to a sitting president over a blow job, when no weapons of any kind were in the mix, and they fear payback — particularly in an investigation based on something other than being sore losers in ’92 and ’96.

There’s more discussion, if you want it, over at Whiskey Bar, where they see a pattern emerging that’s pretty scary.

Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle explains how important “Protection from Pornography Week” is, or was. An excerpt:

After all, porn ruins families. And communities. And children. And puppies. And the upholstery. This is the government line. This is what they would like you to believe. This is why they invented Protection from Pornography Week. Because you need to know They Care. They are on guard. Because you, as always, are under attack. Here is the message: Despite how porn is a multibillion-dollar, record-breaking, insanely popular, widely accepted, gigglingly discussed, generally harmless, often exceedingly sexy and fun and unstoppable force of skin and fake orgasm and cheesy background music and money shots and thrust thrust thrust, it doesn’t really matter. It is pure evil, they say. And it’s coming for your children. Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless porn remains merely that beloved slippery devil so reviled by every sanctimonious group in modern history, that final frontier of bogus moralism and excessive alarmism and puffed-chest indignation and oh my God who pray who will save the children. Statistics are of little use over at the official government PPW site. They do not talk about anything so frivolous as details, such as the porn biz raking in upward of $12 billion per annum, which is more than ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox combined. Or that the combined subscriber base of Penthouse and Playboy exceeds that of Newsweek and Time . Or that more money is spent on porn than on, say, church. Or the NFL. Or Starbucks. Or socks.

Heh.

The White House has announced a new policy on questions from lawmakers, particularly with regard to questions about how it’s spending money.

Now, all such questions must be submitted in writing through the relevant Congressional committees. It is of course a complete coincidence that the chairs of all these committees — and therefore the gatekeepers for all questions — will be Republicans, and that said chairs will be unlikely to forward any Democrat-authored queries to 1600 Pennsylvania.

Former POW Jessica Lynch is now a civilian, and is not shy about speaking her mind in re: the Pentagon’s portrayal of her capture and, in particular, her rescue.

In an ABC interview quoted in this Washington Post story, she says “I’m no hero. . . I’m just a survivor.” She also laments the over-dramatic rescue coverage (“Yeah, I don’t think it happened quite like that”) and expresses her irritation at being used as the Pentagon’s poster soldier.

CNN covers the same interview, as does the New York Times, which includes this quote, absent from the other two stories:

“From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing,” Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, “I’m so thankful for those people, because that’s why I’m alive today.”

It would have been very, very easy for her to just accept and support the Pentagon’s initial version — a blonde Rambo bravely fighting off Iraqi hordes, only to be captured and held in an enemy prison hospital, under heavy guard, awaiting her fate until a daring commando rescue spirited her away — instead of telling the truth, especially in light of the gung-ho war effort. There were no other survivors from her group; hers would be the only voice. It’s impressive that instead of doing so, she tells the truth — that she was terrified, that her gun jammed, that she fired not a shot, that she remembers no mistreatment in the hospital, and that the treatment she did receive saved her life. She thanks her rescuers, too, of course, though she still wonders why they filmed her rescue.

Surely the reason isn’t “calculated PR,” right? I mean, we can completely discount the reports from hospital officials that they attempted to alert US forces of Lych’s whereabouts as soon as she was stable, right? Surely the Pentagon wouldn’t manipulate something like this for public opinion, right?

I just wish I was sure.

This article from the Economist dicusses the horror that is Bush’s fiscal policies in some detail. The phrase from the title of this post comes from a Republican analyst, and is used in reference to their spending habits. Whatever happened to “fiscally conservative” Republicans? Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be the spendthrifts?

Now the GOP is complaining about electronic voting machine trouble in Fairfax County. They’ve even filed suit. Maybe with everybody pissed off, we can do something about ’em.

The USA-PATRIOT Act, like the mob-targeting RICO Act before it, is now being used opportunistically by the FBI in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.

A Shreveport man has been found guilty of obscenity for selling X-rated tapes to undercover officers. Dan Birman, 23, is the owner of Fantasy Video, and now faces 6 months to 3 years in prison, and a fine of up to $2,500. Lincoln Parish DA Bob Levy appears to be on some sort of Ashcroftian anti-porn crusade, and set out to prove that Shreveport’s community standards don’t allow for explicit sexual behavior on tape. The conviction is on appeal.

Now community standards are notoriously fluid things; I suspect it’s possible to show that question to be settled either way, depending on the evidence brought to trial (how about those in-room motel movie rental records?). The bigger problem here isn’t porn vs. puritans; it’s the fact that the D.A. and the state troopers apparently don’t have enough actual crime to pursue — you know, with victims, and maybe even violence — so they decided on an undercover porn operation. I’m sure the good people of Lincoln parish feel much safer now.

The FCC has approved the controversial Broadcast Flag, ignoring thousands and thousands of protest letters. This is a profoundly bad idea; it puts technological innovation in the hands of the content providers, and strikes another blow against the whole idea of Fair Use (a copyright doctrine the RIAA, MPAA and Broadcasters would dearly love to destroy). It also creates a huge class of “legacy” equipment: for example, a DVD recorder purchased next summer (if the rule stands) won’t be able to create DVDs that will play on your current player.

Coverage:

• BoingBoing
• At the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Via PC World

Fortunately, a legal challenge is already in the works. Keep your fingers crossed, folks.

And we’ve got to stop it. Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian. Returning to Canada from vacation in Tunis last September, he flew from there to Zurich to New York, intending to continue on to Montreal. US officials detained him in New York, refused his requests for an attorney, would not tell him what charges or allegations resulted in his arrest, and eventually deported him — to SYRIA, where they knew he would be tortured or killed. He was held for over a year in total — ten months in Syria — before finally being released on October 5, thanks to the efforts of his wife and Canadian authorities.

This is his statement. Read it, and try to figure out why our Shining City on the Hill decided to detain a Canadian citizen on nebulous grounds and ultimately — and deliberately — subject him to the treatment they knew Syria would provide.

Longtime Heathen and fellow Mississippi expatriate R.N. called my attention to this entry at Talking Points Memo. Apparently, the Mississippi Secretary of State has already notified Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore and both Mississippi district US Attorneys about allegations of voter intimidation in minority counties. Here’s a PDF of the letter sent by Secretary Clark.

I’m very glad Clark has taken quick action here, but the fact that he needed to makes me feel ill.

Two bits, actually.

1. First, the EFF announced today that it’s filing suit against Diebold for abuse of copyright claims; they’ll be representing the Swarthmore students who linked to the leaked memos.
2. In other news, Wired News is running a story about electronic voting systems that DON’T suck — in Australia. Quotes:

   “Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me — someone with a vested interest in the project’s success?” [Lead engineer Matt Quinn] said. “A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to ‘prove’ the system’s integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.”

   And on the wretched security and design of the Diebold system:

   “The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections,” Quinn said. “It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.”

Maybe now this story will get the legs it needs.

Frank notes that perhaps I was unfair to Mississippi yesterday, so I’ve provided supplemental and clarifying remarks in reply to his comments.

On one hand, we have shameless mouthpiece Condi Rice, insisting in New York (NYT link; use nogators/nogators) that the terror attacks happened because prior administrations didn’t do enough to stop terrorism (odd, by the way, that instead of just naming Clinton, she used a phrase that implicitly damns GHWB as well, not to mention the Gipper himself). Er, right, Condi.

As a counterpoint, I’ll note that Clinton’s attempts at neutralizing Osama bin Laden are frequently held up as “wag the dog” scenarios by the Right, happening as they did during the GOP’s 7-year attempt to remove Clinton from office. Make of this what you will.

On the other hand, we have Paula Zahn being horrified that 9/11 is being used for political gain in this election cycle. Is she talking about Condi Rice? No. She means Wes Clark’s comments:

There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9/11. You can’t blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated memos with each other. The buck rests with the commander-in-chief, right on George W. Bush’s desk.

Zahn and her guest, Joe Klein, behave as if the notion of a leader taking responsibility for events that happen on his watch comes straight from Red China, or at least Mars. They say nothing, of course, of the aforementioned “not my fault” claim from Rice, and conveniently fail to mention the fact that the Bush White House has done everything in its power to avoid cooperating with the Congressional 9/11 investigation. An inciteful analysis of this little bit can be had at the oft-cited, always compelling Slacktivist.

Who’s politicizing 9/11? Tell me again: which president’s go-it-alone, isolationist, we-ought-not-be-nation-building policies ruled the roost until September 10? You do the math. Obviously the truly responsible parties are (a) atomized bits languishing in Fishkill; and (b) Osama bin Laden, whereabouts unknown. However, the buck does stop at 1600 Pennsylvania. He doesn’t get blame, but as our President he is expected to take responsibility. To do so would be a mark of character, which heretofore has been something that mattered to the GOP. Instead, we get the behavior Slacktivist describes here:

To this very day, the Bush administration is stonewalling the commission led by Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey. This determined refusal to investigate smells rotten — it stinks of corruption, complicity and an utter rejection of adult responsibility.

The Justice Department has been trying for quite some time to prevent the release of an independent workforce diversity study. It finally turned loose of the document this week, though nearly half of it was redacted.

Nobody told Justice, however, that the format they released it in (PDF Image+Text) retained the redacted portions, so now the whole thing is available via MemoryHole. Clever, aren’t they? (Calpundit coverage).

GOP bigwig and almost-certain Mississippi governor Haley Barbour is busily wrapping himself in the Confederate Battle Flag via his campaign literature, no doubt to appeal to those who see removing the symbol from the state flag as creeping Yankee-ism. Many in the state (two years ago, the vote was 2 to 1 to keep the current state flag) continue to insist that it’s a symbol of “heritage, not hate,” and that it’s tied to Southern history and not the war specifically.

This is, of course, absurdly wrong. The battle flag wasn’t used until the South took up arms against the Union and its Constitution. It’s not about State’s Rights (an argument which seems to suggest that states need not honor the Bill of Rights). It’s not about heritage. It’s about a war fought over slavery, and our ancestors seemed to think owning people was a good idea — or, at least, they wanted to fight for their right to do so.

The most stunning thing to me is how hell-bent some folks seem on keeping the battle flag despite how offensive it is to a huge percentage of Americans and Mississippians. Even if the heritage argument held water, it’s still indisputably a flag tied directly to a treasonous regime dedicated to positions such as this:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [i.e., opposing the notion that all men are created equal – ed]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. March, 1861 speech by CSA VP Alexander Stephens, cited here.

Given that, what do we gain by insisting on its continued presence on our flags? And what do we lose? And what would our mommas say about us clinging to this battle flag despite the distress it causes the decendents of those same slaves? What does this say about us? And what does Barbour’s cynical use of it, and almost certain success therein, say about my home state?

I want to be proud of Mississippi. I really do. But issues like Barbour and the battle flag make it damned hard to convince outsiders that my home state isn’t full of unreconstructed racists.