Tom makes quite a cogent argument... well said.

RE: Suit: W.Va. Police Chief Denied Gay Man CPR - Yahoo! News

Octavia Butler, the brilliant science fiction writer, reportedly died on Saturday following a fall.

Somehow I missed this. Very unfortunate.

a great loss she was a fine writer

Boing Boing: RIP, Octavia Butler,

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

This is a good explanation of the context around the cartoon war.

Why I Published Those Cartoons

terratogen enters the fray....

I had to make one. How can I grow old as an artist and have people ask "What did you do during the Cartoon War?" and have nothing to show for it except a thumb up my ass. How many calls to arms will artists get in a lifetime? Artists should have a duty to make their own personal Muhammad Cartoon! Causing fear is how terror extremist groups gauge if they are winning or not. The world needs to stop being afraid of these idiots and paint them up like clowns with guns. Any group which cannot respect another world view deserves to look stupid. They need to start taking themselves much less seriously. Remember The Guru Maharaj ji ? He ripped off his followers for decades and promised to levitate the Houston Astro Dome with "Green Energy"(where was this bastard during Katrina???). I understand that people like to believe in their magic little spiritual worlds, to get the rush you get when you feel self important for no good reason at all. And everyone should have every right to do so. However, not acknowledging fundamentals of reality makes you look like an idiot to people who see things differently. Do you think some people are stupid? So do I! It's not about morality, right or wrong, or any self-righteous platform... It's about TRUTH. If you want yours to Dominate someone else's, those people are going to look at you either like a big fat DUMMY or a God (as if you have to ask which you might look like!). Getting irate, belligerent, and violent doesn't change the fact that some people are not interested in your Kool-Aid! This goes for you neo-right-wing-jesus juice slurping-fascist-christians as well. If your spirituality is not a PERSONAL experience... There is a large chunk of the world who considers you an ASSHOLE and your way of life ANNOYING! If you don't like having your bible-bubble burst, then SHUT the fuck up and it's a non-issue! When you open the panel for discussion, you will learn that "religion" does not equal "reality" and you will deserve it.

T-Shirts and other merchandise of my cartoon are available HERE. I think that the fact that I made one when there are Fatwas going around prooves that my balls are big enough to warrant your support.

Muhammad Cartoon for the Cartoon War

Married people are happier than unmarrieds. People who worship frequently are happier than those who don't. Republicans are happier than Democrats. Rich people are happier than poor people. Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks. Sunbelt residents are happier than those who live in the rest of the country.

Get rich, get married, get religion, get a gun, get a place in Miami, and vote for Jeb...

One wonders if Democrats are less happy because they spend more time thinking about poor people, gun violence, and the long term impacts of foreign policy rather then enjoying low taxes and military ass kicking.

Pew Research Center: Are We Happy Yet?

This page links the cartoon in case you are curious. Yeah, its inceditary, but give me a fucking break.

Hamas members, some armed with guns, stormed the EU office and demanded apologies from EU member states, or face serious consequences. "It will be a suitable reaction, and it won't be predictable," said Abu Hafss, a member of the Al Quds Brigade (an affiliate of the group Islamic Jihad).

A suitable reaction? What are they going to do, draw their own cartoon? "I'll draw this fucking cartoon, man! I'm serious! I'll draw it! You better back down right now or the pen is hitting the paper! I'm not fucking around here!"

The more these idiots prance around with machine guns and threaten to kill people over a cartoon, the more they reenforce the inceditary message the cartoon conveys. If they aren't a violent culture they should put down the AK-47s and act like they aren't a violent culture.

Tensions continue to rise in Middle East over Cartoons

The ironies abound. If this is how defenders of the NSA program must proceed in order to argue for its legality, they well fit the caricature of judicial activism that generations of conservatives have tarred liberals with when liberals argue for extensions of civil rights and civil liberties protections. That is, instead of being constrained by law in the first instance, defenders argue that a program would be good policy and therefore strain to find that it is not illegal or unconstitutional.

The conservative infighting begins.

[the law] offers us a place to stand when we object to the aggrandizement of power by those who are utterly convinced that they come to us as saviors. For many years conservatives warned us about would-be saviors of the left, who would sweep away legal restraints to pursue their vision of a just society. It is time to stand up to the would-be saviors of the right, who seek to concentrate unaccountable power in order to pursue their vision of national security.

nicely put

Legislating from the bench

Bush, whose aides said they consider the issue a clear political winner, is resurrecting tactics from the last campaign to make the NSA spying program a referendum on which party will keep the United States safe from terrorists. He has dispatched top White House officials almost daily to defend the program and has sent a message to party activists that he considers fighting terrorism with tools such as NSA eavesdropping the defining issue of the November elections

Worth reading. Troublesome.

The story here is not whether or not it ought to be authorized but whether or not is was authorized. Almost no one understands this distinction. The Republican talking points are:
1. Its legal.
2. Its needed to defend America.
3. People raising questions about its legality are partisan hacks who don't care about the safety of the American people.

The problem is that its probably not legal. I haven't seen a legal analysis coming from outside the administration that jives with the position of the administration. But the common man is not going to understand subtle Constitutional questions. The Democrats have to fight this fight, because its a basic separation of power issue. They can't just leave it on the floor. However, they are going to loose the political dialog because you really have to think about this in order to understand it, and most people are incapable of doing that, and many who aren't are partisan enough to be unwilling to do it objectively. If the Republicans loose in court they are likely to be able to spin that its another example of judicial activism and the ACLU hates America, etc...

What it really comes down to is the honesty of the Republican Party at large. They are being told, via this message, to tow the line on this. They are trapped in a position where if they disagree on this issue they must risk the support of the party and their political chances in November in order to take a stand. This issue will not fly if enough Republicans take a stand on it, but its going to be a very, very difficult decision for them to make (which is why Rove is putting the above sort of pressure on them).

On the balance is the entire idea of the rule of law. If the President can simply violate the law at will, argue that the court system is biased, and pressure the legislature into towing the line for political reasons, there effectively is no law. Or, in particular, there is no law with regard to minority interests. As long as the President is capable of garnering popular support for something it can be pursued irrespective of the checks and balances in our system.

The Miers nomination demonstrated that the Conservative legal community is capable of fighting the President when it wants to. This is a time and place where it ought to. We'll see if it has the guts. If it doesn't, we'll have slipped quite far down the slope toward an unravelling of the rule of law...

Rift Between Parties Over NSA Wiretapping Grows

noteworthy wrote:
That's it! A public algorithm. What we need here is a global-scale collaborative filter. We could resume the draft, but for NSA instead of the Army. You could work from home, or even in your car, for an hour each day, listening in on phone calls. But mind you, as the President said, that "There is a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring." This is just the detection phase. If you hear something suspicious, you just press a number key, 1 through 9, to indicate how urgently dangerous it seems. The call is then forwarded to a professional for further handling, including FISA procedures as necessary.

A national "nosey neighbor jury" is a tremendously bad idea, but I underline it because its innovative and it would make a great science fiction short story. 80% of the phone calls flagged by it would likely be flagged because of various prejudices.

The meme that has been going around that "its not really an invasion of privacy if its just a computer listenning to the phone call" is absolutely falicious. Those computers serve human ends. Next they'll be arguing that there is no 4th amendment implication if they randomly send a drug sniffing robot into your house without a warrant. If thats the direction our legal jurisprudence heads we might as well roll up the Constitution and smoke it.

There are two reasons we don't do random searches:
1. Such things are inevitably abused for political purposes.
2. They contribute to a culture of fear and suspicion.

In the context of preventing significant terrorist incidents, if it is in fact useful to do this, then I think that where you've removed the court oversight from the data collection you need to add it to the data application. The people involved in this surveillance are firewalled from the people involved in pursuing leads and they have to present the information they collect to a FISA style court before they can share it. Such a check would ensure that the information is specifically related to national security issues and isn't about a political enemy or a minor crime.

RE: Wired News: Mass Spying Means Gross Errors

The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They
do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have
now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have
implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan
to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to
be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things
one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is
not usually one of them.

This analysis is troubling. It suggests that Iran will provoke the U.S. into attacking it, because they want to get attacked.

Stratfor on what the hell Iran is up to...