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.