You can bank on it, I think. Eric Holder has apparently been moving in that direction, and JD officials were a bit put off on hearing Rahn Emanuel’s comments to the contrary. Holder may name an outside counsel to investigate torture.
This is coming from Newsweek via Rachel Maddow.
This is being reported:
President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.
[Earlier,] … he said “it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution.” He did not specifically address the policymakers.
Asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president believes they “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.
More details are needed. Is there or is there not a presidential pardon for CIA (or equivilant) field operatives and is there or is there not a presidential pardon for Bush White House “policy makers.” Who are “policy makers” and more importantly, who are NOT “policy makers.” (I.e., is there anyone left out of this rubric?)
“Hey, look! I’ve located my first love! Cool, maybe we can go have dinner or something!” … precisely the words a newlywed husband was hoping to hear from his wife …
Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of “A Brief History of Time” who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he teaches as a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.
“Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,” the university said.
…I sat in the bar with the old man from Italy and thought about how much of our common knowledge of historical events is based on the plots of movies. Talking to Vincenzo forced me to step back and question these assumptions that I myself make. If I learn something from a movie, before I convict someone in my own mind, fairness dictates that I research a bit more….
Salieri and Mozart in Vesuvio Saloon @ Quiche Moraine Dot Com
h/t: Grrrrrrrrl
A joint project by Democrats has flipped traditional fund-raising on its head, by starting a campaign aimed at collecting $1 a day from supporters “to make Norm Coleman go away.”
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a new group working to get like-minded candidates elected, has teamed up with Howard Dean’s Democracy for America to tap the wallets of Democrats who are disgruntled by the five-month-old ballot contest in Minnesota between Mr. Coleman, the former Republican senator, and Al Franken, the Democrat.
From a University of Chicago Press Release.
The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 23, 2009, by Andrew Gillis and Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, and Randall Dahn of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.
Continue reading Fins Limbs and Gills (And how they evolved)
During the election campaign, the Palin/Whatshisname ticket made hay over Obama’s statements that he would engage in international conversations with unsavory knee-jerks such as the president of Iran. I call these people knee-jerks because they invoke a knee-jerk response in right wing and even moderate circles. Obama is of course right in that it is counter productive to write off any possibility of communication with another nation or a globally significant faction of any kind a priori. Sure, writing them off a priori makes a point, and does so in a powerful way. But then what do you do? “The Point” has been made with Cuba for almost 50 years, and as a strategy to rid the Western Hemisphere of it’s only major entrenched communist regime has worked as poorly as any national level foreign policy has ever worked ever, for any country, in all of modern history.
Engagement is an important question at local levels as well. For instance, I find the American Chemical Society to be obnoxious, and I find Shell Oil to be evil. You will notice however that these two companies appear to be two of the major sponsors of Scienceblogs.com. Am I complaining? No. Am I kicking their respective asses somehow? Well, I am actually ignoring the American Chemical Society, but yes, I speak out now and then against Shell, and will probably do more in the future. Does Seed Media care? Well, I hope they care in some way about stuff generally, but I don’t believe that there is any squeamishness on their part about Sb bloggers writing critically about Seed or Sb sponsor. And I’m not guessing here. This is the message that has been conveyed to me. Essentially, they are telling me “Just blog … whatever.”
Now, we have an interesting other example of the engagement issue playing out on the national stage. This is in relation to the UN’s Durban Review Conference, which is an international conference on racism starting now. There has been a lot of arguing about to related issues: 1) Israel and all it’s conservative government stands for (in relation to racism) and Islamic vs. Western perspectives (to the extent that this false dichotomy exists) on religious co-called “tolerance” or “intolerance.” As a result of this mucking around, several Western nations are not attending the conference at all, or are only sending low level officials. The only national leader who will be attending is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whacko holocaust denier and general dickhead (all due respect intended).
I don’t know what the U.S. would be doing, under Obama, if this conference had come later in time or if the Bush Depression had not been in full swing at the start of Obama’s term. The failure of the entire “West” to engage at this conference certainly complicates matters. What will probably have to happen over the next few years is a lot of groundwork, followed by a national racism conference at which two or three Islamic World leaders, two or three Western World leaders (including the kid with the big ears and the funny name) and for or five “Third World” relatively non-Western and non-Religious state leaders (such as the leaders of South Africa and Indonesia) all play a prominent part and are all seen sipping tea together and so on.
Disengagement is not an option. The West is wrong for not showing up at this conference. The British, who are showing up at a low level, have said that if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran starts in with the anti-Semitic thing, they’ll storm out of the hall. Well, that’s a start … at least somebody is doing something.
Change is made by those who show up. Let’s all start showing up, please.
Banned (briefly) on Facebook:
As expected, New York Gov. David Paterson (D) unveiled legislation Thursday morning to allow same-sex couples to marry in the Empire State.
Standing beside New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R), openly gay Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) and state leaders and union leaders, Paterson said “Marriage equality is about basic civil rights and freedom. That is why we stand together today to embrace civil rights for every New Yorker.”
Paterson’s bill would amend the domestic relations law allowing civil marriages between same-sex couples, and he called on the Legislature to approve the bill.
Or, more exactly, where are they all going to go during the next two or three months?
I’m sitting here between a large frozen lake and a small “pond” (connected to the lake with a channel) that has patches of open water on it. (The melting on the pond is probably because the bioactivity at the bottom of the pond increases water temperature.) There is a pair of mallards on the pond, and I expect that in a few weeks there will be two or three mallards and three or for mergansers, all females, and each with between six and 12 or so ducklings. These 60 ducklings will initially hang out only with their mothers, but as time goes by the mothers will overlap their feeding territories and night time roosts, and the ducklings will start to form a creche. It is even possible for a multispecies creche to form.
Continue reading Where have all the ducklings gone??
Eric Black of MinnPost Dot Com has made an interesting observation. Last week the three judge panel charged with hearing Norm Coleman’s “Election Contest” (that’s a thing … an election contest is a kind of suit claiming that an election did not go properly) finished their job. They ruled against some of Coleman’s claims, but they did count extra ballots as Colman had insisted. That addition of new ballots — all absentee ballots — resulted in Franken’s lead growing.
From that ruling, the plaintiff has ten days to file an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The appeal itself is a simple form. This is the sort of thing that would be ready in advance to hand over to the court right after the final ruling of the case being finished.
But, Norm Coleman has not yet filed the appeal.
There are several possible reasons for this unusual behavior, including:
Continue reading An important deduction regarding the Minnesota Senate recount