derivative work

Just like Maddow after Jindal, I am rendered speechless by the DOJ memos released on Monday. Most were by my former Con Law professor; among the notable exceptions was the repudiation of these policies last October. Holy Constitutional Law, Batman. * DOJ – Office of Legal Counsel memos * NYT (3/3) * LAT (3/3) * [...]

sweet: Obama halts all regulations pending review 17 hours ago AP 2009/01/20 WASHINGTON (AP) — One of President Barack Obama’s first acts is to order federal agencies to halt all pending regulations until his administration can review them. The order went out Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Obama was inaugurated president, in a memorandum signed by [...]

Ross Douthat’s op-ed in the NYT is a showcase for the deceptive rhetoric of the right. The piece is a long paean to the supposed reasonableness and willingness to compromise of the anti-choice movement. He wraps up by attempting to lay the “blame” on Roe and Casey for the “failure” of Americans to reach peace [...]

I’m contemplating Bush’s potential pardon of his various underlings for their roles in torture or other illegal actions, and I’m angry. The Presidential pardoning power can be and should be used for humanitarian reasons — for mercy, or for justice, when for whatever reason those are not available through ordinary means. There’s also a good [...]

The NYT tells us today about Kevin Martin & the FCC’s new plan to relax the cross-ownership rules, which restrict large corporations from dominating entire urban markets. And, on the same page, on the same day, a story that has all the classic hallmarks of the Bush approach to the environment: scuttle environmental protection schemes [...]

James Comey’s testimony Tuesday before Congress was riveting.

Sometimes one despairs and relies on others to speak truth to power. Many have done so with respect to with respect to the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″, but Kent Keith Olbermann‘s was particularly eloquent. update: Ahem. Apparently that’s Keith Olbermann, and Kent Brockman. Another sign of aging, because I would never ordinarily confuse the [...]

Forbes apparently publishes an annual list of the top-earning dead celebrities and creators. They note that Shakespeare would be way up there: [Forbes] calculated what the Bard’s heirs might collect each year if he were still under copyright and estimated it at $15 million with over 5,000 performances of his plays and hundreds of thousands [...]

Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]

bradblog chronicles the disappearance of info from the Bush administration websites chomsky reminds us of the reagan administration destruction of documents democratic underground.com covered the replacement of the National Archivist with a partisan hack [2004-05-05] — just in time to cover the release of the Bush I records! How con-veeeenient.

“[The media] would still roll over for Bush in tonight’s debate, if only he had told his lies crisply and with folksy assurance.”

From Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog., Saturday 12-June-2004: Torture: A last recourse we may require sooner and sooner The Medium Lobster has been disquieted of late at by the latest round of Iraq torture scandal news. There has been much uproar – among that irritating minority which have not been studiously scrutinizing [...]