The Truth About Barack Obama

 Rumors the Obama campaign shouldn't try to correct.

By Christopher Beam

The Barack Obama presidential campaign introduced a new site last week, FightTheSmears.com, that it hopes will debunk persistent myths about the senator: that he's a Muslim, that he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. As we have argued before, restating the myths often reinforces them, no matter how persuasively they've been refuted.

Rather than restate untruths about Obama, the campaign would do better to start some rumors of its own. Here's a template e-mail the Obama campaign might consider disseminating.

From: [Redacted]
To: [Redacted]
Subject: WHO IS BARACK OBAMA?

There are many things people do not know about BARACK OBAMA. It is every American's duty to read this message and pass it along to all of their friends and loved ones.

Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times. Even in the shower.

Barack Obama says the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE every time he sees an American flag. He also ends every sentence by saying, "WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL." Click here for video of Obama quietly mouthing the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE in his sleep.

A tape exists of Michelle Obama saying the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE at a conference on PATRIOTISM.

Every weekend, Barack and Michelle take their daughters HUNTING.

Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.

Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It's upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups.

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CBS foreign correspondent: Watching US news would ‘drive me nuts’

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Chief CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan, who recently returned from Iraq, appeared on Tuesday's Daily Show.

"Do we know anything about what's going on over there?" Jon Stewart asked.

I don't think we really do have very much of an idea," Logan replied. "We have all these armchair academics who go over for one visit. See Laura Bush saying, 'This is my third time in Afghanistan.' She doesn't mention that she was only there for a few seconds."

The outspoken Logan — who has stated in the past that Americans have no idea how badly the war is going because of the suppression of pictures of American casualties — made no attempt to hide her contempt for American coverage of the Iraq and Afghan Wars.

"Do you watch the news that we're watching in the United States?" Stewart asked. "Do you see what we're hearing about the war?"

"No," replied Logan. "If I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I'd just blow my brains out, because it would drive me nuts."

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Halliburton Subsidiary Faulted For Hurricane Work

"Washington Watchdogs," a periodic feature of the Post's Investigations blog, looks at the findings of the federal government's official investigators.

Reports of problems with defense contractor KBR Inc. just keep piling up.

The Houston-based company's efforts to repair Navy facilities following Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina were deemed shoddy and substandard, auditors say, prompting one technical adviser to claim that the federal government "certainly paid twice" for many KBR projects because of "design and workmanship deficiencies," according to a report (see PDF here) released today by the Defense Department's inspector general.

The report, released following a Freedom of Information Act request, says the U.S. Navy hired KBR, Inc., then known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, in July 2004 to repair Defense Department facilities after Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. The federal government agreed to pay the company $500 million over five years.

At the time, the company was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the Texas oil company, whose former chief executive is Vice President Dick Cheney.

As part of the Navy project, KBR was tasked with removing water-damaged carpet and drywall; applying temporary roofing; removing debris; and building trailer parks for displaced Navy families at the Naval air stations in Pensacola, Fla.; Gulfport, Miss.; the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Miss.; and other Navy facilities in the Gulf Coast region.

Among the inspector general's findings:

-- KBR awarded sole-source or limited competition subcontracts that overpaid hourly rates to roofers and paid $4.1 million worth of services and meals that should have cost only $1.7 million

-- The Navy entered into an illegal "cost-plus-percentage-of-cost" contract with KBR, the audit found. As a result, higher costs meant higher profit and KBR was rewarded for "inefficiency and non-economical performance."

-- KBR was paid nearly all of the contract amounts despite "marginal-to-average performance," the audit found.

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There Will Necessarily Be a Break

by: Clotilde Cadu Interviewing Jean-Gabriel Fredet, Le Nouvel Observateur

George W. Bush's European Farewell Tour. (Art: Horsch/Die Standard)

    Clotilde Cadu: George W. Bush is just finishing up his round of Europe these last few days. What is the point of European leaders talking to an American president on the eve of his departure? Was there any real diplomatic substance to Bush's visits with European heads of state or were they purely symbolic?

    Jean-Gabriel Fredet: They were largely symbolic in nature. France's reputation for anti-Americanism precedes it. Nicolas Sarkozy has decided to get off on a different foot, to show that we are the United States' best allies. The announcement of France's arrival in NATO's integrated command was already a symbol that he addressed to American public opinion, not only to Bush. These are symbols of reconciliation, of the return of the friendship between France and the United States. Sarkozy is taking the risk of meeting with a president at the end of his term, which, moreover, is certainly one of the worst in the entire history of the United States. He wants to show that we remain reliable allies. With his strong gestures, he wants to make it known to Bush and to his successor that after the sour moon, now it's the honeymoon between France and the United States. It's also symbolic in Germany. That country condemned the intervention in Iraq. But it's very Atlanticist, very pro-American. There are connections between these countries that go beyond the person who represents them. These connections persist in spite of those persons.

    What will history preserve of the George W. Bush presidency?

    - Bad things! Three specifically. First, unilateralism, force that takes precedence over law. That's the philosophy of the Iraq invasion. To satisfy an almost personal revenge, George W. Bush flouted international law.

    Then, the failure of the war against terrorism. The Iraq invasion had a counterproductive effect; that is, it provoked a feeling of hostility towards the United States from all Muslim countries. There are buds of insurrection in Afghanistan, fires poorly extinguished in Iraq.

    Finally, under the Bush presidency, the fires of free-trade neo-liberalism were pushed to a level never before achieved under his predecessors. The rich got richer; the poor, poorer; deficits deepened.... The American economy is in recession and unemployment is on the rise.

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Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

By Warren P. Strobel

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

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Bounds of authority

Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights

In the waning months of his tenure, President Bush and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president's powers to spy on Americans without a court order.

This week, the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill hope to announce a "compromise" on a domestic spying bill. If they do, it will be presented as an indispensable tool for protecting the nation's security that still safeguards our civil liberties. The White House will paint opponents as weak-kneed liberals who do not understand and cannot stand up to the threat of terrorism.

The bill is not a compromise. The final details are being worked out, but all indications are that many of its provisions are both unnecessary and a threat to the Bill of Rights. The White House and the Congressional Republicans who support the bill have two real aims. They want to undermine the power of the courts to review the legality of domestic spying programs. And they want to give a legal shield to the telecommunications companies that broke the law by helping Mr. Bush carry out his warrantless wiretapping operation.

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McCain Proposes Drilling in Anwar Sadat

By Don Davis

 

"LET'S FACE IT, AS A DEAD GUY HE'S EVEN MORE OF A FOSSIL THAN I AM, AND I WON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT PISSING OFF FLORIDA."

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Darwinmania!

by Olivia Judson

The party is about to begin.

In a week or so, the trumpets will sound, heralding the start of 18 months of non-stop festivities in honor of Charles Darwin. July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of his discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution. Since 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (Feb. 12), as well as being the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species" (Nov. 24), the extravaganza is set to continue until the end of next year. Get ready for Darwin hats, t-shirts, action figures, naturally selected fireworks and evolving chocolates. Oh, and lots of books and speeches.

But hold on. Does he deserve all this? He wasn't, after all, the first person to suggest that evolution happens. For example, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, speculated about it towards the end of the 18th century; at the beginning of the 19th, the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck made a strong case for it. Lamarck, however, failed to be generally persuasive because he didn't have a plausible mechanism — he could see that evolution takes place, but he didn't know how. That had to wait until the discovery of natural selection.

Natural selection is what we normally think of as Darwin's big idea. Yet he wasn't the first to discover that, either. At least two others — a doctor called William Wells, and a writer called Patrick Matthew — discovered it years before Darwin did. Wells described it (admittedly briefly) in 1818, when Darwin was just 9; Matthew did so in 1831, the year that Darwin set off on board HMS Beagle for what became a five-year voyage around the world.

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U.S. economy may dodge recession bullet

by David Olive

There are just 218 days to go until the end of the Bush Administration, and hope of a U.S. economic revival that will spill over into Canada.

You wonder some days if the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that installed George W. Bush in the White House in 2000 sought to restore Herbert Hoover's reputation. The hapless 31st U.S. president at least tried to soften the blow of the Great Depression, though his methods were not the radical prescription required to save capitalism from itself.

The Bush administration seems not just powerless but not much interested in the current U.S. economic malaise. True, Bush went along with the demand of a Democratic-controlled Congress for a $168 billion (U.S.) emergency stimulus package. But the $600 cheques cut by the U.S. Treasury that began going out last month have mostly been swallowed up in credit-card paydowns and soaring fuel and food costs. Bush also buckled to Congress' demand that he halt additions to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was intended to remove a source of demand and thus curb rising prices. Alas, pump prices are up 23 cents since the president acted.

Bush famously doesn't read the papers, so his sanguine aspect in delivering an economic pep talk June 6 did not surprise. Bush and his economic advisers seem oblivious to the 28-year low in U.S. consumer confidence, the 441,000 private-sector jobs lost over the past six months, and a financial sector still crippled by the housing crisis and that now denies loans even to the most credit-worthy individuals and companies.

On that particular Friday of Bush's "fundamentally sound" talk:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Index plunged nearly 400 points;
• Bush's own Labor Department reported a fifth consecutive month of job losses and that the jobless rate had surged to 5.5 per cent in May, the biggest monthly increase in 22 years;
• And there was a double-digit increase in crude prices.

Bush simply regurgitated old news, including the stimulus package of doubtful efficacy. He called for stepped-up U.S. domestic crude exploration, presumably off the California coast and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR), which Bush knows are political non-starters, and perhaps doesn't know would add little to global reserves even at full production.

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McCain sells his balls

by Ed Naha

Last week, in an attempt to raise campaign cash, John McCain put his balls up for sale...and was met with derision. No, this event didn't occur at one of McCain's stooge-infested Town Hall Meetings but, rather, on his train-wreck of a web site - you know, the one that initially had such designated areas as "Creating Jobs," "Strategy," "Decision Center" and "Golf."

The balls in question were golf balls, packaged in a $50 sack, and deemed the perfect gift for Father's Day - although the actual package wouldn't arrive until late July. (What a maverick move!) Satisfied customers were invited to post their opinions of McCain's balls. And thus, the floodgates were opened for well-deserved snark, replete with creative double entendres and spelling.

Lobbyist Buddy from Washington D.C. wrote: "The Golf Pack is Great, but when are you going to offer a Joe Lieberman Certified McCain Ballwasher?"

"IRAQ FOREVER!!!" gushed reviewer Mitt Romney from Boston, MA. "I thought that I would give this McBush golf set to Dad for Father's Day as a way to commemorate his leaving Mom for the younger, blonder, much richer woman!!"

Walter San Miguel from Miami Lakes, FL stated: "NOT JUST FOR GOLF. This is just the thing for strolling around the Baghdad Market with 100 soldiers; 2 Blackhawks; and 3 Apache gunships, and then tell us that Baghdad is safe!!!!!"

Jack Abramoff from Washington, DC, enthused: "Yep, good ol' Chinese Quality! Just like we used to make in 'Merica."

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The Saga Of The Protest Song

by Mike Ragogna

 

About a month ago, while running some errands in the car with my nephew, we were listening to one of several interchangeable Clear Channel stations and by about the fifth song, I was amazed at how much this "rock" did not. Whatever, I remained smiley and quiet so the young'un could enjoy his ride but predictably, by the next guitar-driven slice of angst, I could no longer contain myself and proceeded to abuse it with fervor. Being a good sport, my nephew joined-in, but quickly surfed for a neutral station.

He found some classic rock, his education of the genre the result of guitar lessons from his 48-year-old teacher and songs featured on his favorite show, Supernatural. All was well until two songs later when it was HIS turn to abuse the music, pointing out many undeniable Spinal Tap moments. But then the next song played--CCR's "Fortunate Son." Though I knew he was familiar with the recording, this time, something was different. I caught my nephew focusing intensely on the song. His being 15, I figured maybe the song's rebellious tone had gotten his attention. But it was something more...he was asking questions about its political lyrics and theme.

Realizing I was witnessing his possible political awakening, I began what we dubbed "Mike's Eternal Saga Of The Protest Song" in which I detailed the concept. I told him folkies, singer-songwriters, soul artists, rockers and many popsters used their records for spreading socially-conscious messages, especially during the '60s and '70s. I touched on the turbulence of those times, eras filled with Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King, Nixon, the Vietnam war, Woodstock, Kent State, and so much more. Having heard "What's Goin' On," "Blowin' In The Wind," "Big Yellow Taxi," "Get Together," "For What It's Worth," "Ohio" and "Teach Your Children" throughout his young life, he was no stranger to the genre, though he now was fascinated with how artists could be the "voice of the people," an empowering concept for a 15-year-old would-be guitar hero.

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MSNBC's Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow may be the future of political punditry

by Aaron Barnhart

Because primary season lasted five months instead of five weeks, I spent many nights in front of the TV watching voting results trickle in.

That's how I got to know Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, the number-cruncher and the pundit who were hired not long ago to beef up MSNBC's election coverage.

Have they ever.

Todd's endlessly interesting breakdowns of delegate math recently got him named "MVP of the primary season" by the Huffington Post. The Washington Post 's media critic called him "the campaign season's most improbable TV star," which may have been a reference to his on-air delivery, his facial hair and his abundant use of the word "fascinating," such as to describe voter turnout in Indiana.

As for Maddow, the onetime barista and morning-zoo sidekick has seen her airtime grow exponentially, most notably on "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," where she now fills in when the host is gone.

"She's terrific," Olbermann said. "Wonderfully informed, totally prepared, forceful and yet respectful." Also young, gay, geeky and one of the few unapologetic left-wing voices in mainstream media.

The arrival of Maddow and Todd signals a generational change at MSNBC, which after years of missteps seems to be finding its way. I've always enjoyed "Countdown," and "Hardball With Chris Matthews" is amusing, but the rest of MSNBC's lineup was unwatchable for a long time. It tried to imitate CNN and Fox News but just made them look brilliant by comparison.

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These days, politics requires comedic timing

by Julie Hinds

Cue the fist bump. Prepare the post-Camelot pearls and sleeveless dress. Michelle Obama is ready for her close-up.

The wife of the Democratic presidential candidate will be a guest host on "The View" on Wednesday, a chore her GOP counterpart, Cindy McCain, tackled in April.

Obama, who's bound to address the recent buzz that she's become a Republican target, is a natural for television. Her on-air style has a relaxed confidence. Her candor keeps things interesting. It's easy to imagine her having her own syndicated daytime program or anchoring the fourth hour of "Today."

But that's a basic requirement for any future White House resident, isn't it? Obama's stint on "The View" is another example of how blurred the boundaries have become between entertainment and politics in current presidential campaigning.

Under the old rules, candidates had to be willing to sit down with the likes of Leno or Letterman in order to seem like good sports and reach a wider audience. That basically meant being able to do 10 minutes of late-night banter without putting viewers to sleep.

The new rules are much more demanding. Now, in the quest to reach the Oval Office, candidates - and their spouses - must combine the skills of a Jon Stewart and a John F. Kennedy. Voters aren't just looking for a leader. They also want someone who can double as Talk-Show-Host-In-Chief.

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This Land Is Their Land: How the Rich Confiscate Natural Beauty from the Public

In the era of the superrich, if a place is truly beautiful, ordinary people can't afford to be there.

 

By Barbara Ehrenreich
 

I took a little vacation recently -- nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and "opera house." What luck -- the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale! Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect micro-vacation.

But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister -- maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet? -- because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions -- a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.

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The Perils of Potent Pot

Is better marijuana really worse for you?

by Jacob Sullum

According to federal drug czar John Walters, the marijuana available in the United States is better than ever. Well, that's not quite the way he put it, but it's closer to the truth.

Last week, as part of its ongoing effort to convince baby boomers that today's "Pot 2.0" is much more dangerous than the stuff they smoked when they were young, Walters' Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) announced that "levels of THC—the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—have reached the highest-ever amounts since scientific analysis of the drug began in the late 1970s." The University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project reports that the average THC content of the seized marijuana it tests was 8.1 percent last year, up from 3.2 percent in 1983.

That increase is much less dramatic than the one Walters alleged a few years ago. In a 2002 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece, he asserted that "the potency of available marijuana has not merely 'doubled,' but increased as much as 30 times" since 1974, when "the average THC content of marijuana was less than 1 percent."

Since 1 percent is the threshold at which experimental subjects can detect a psychoactive effect, if Walters were right it would mean that people who smoked pot in the mid-'70s, when marijuana was even more popular than it is today, typically did not get high as a result. This rather implausible claim is based on a small, nonrepresentative sample of low-quality marijuana that probably degraded in storage.

Worse, to get his impressive 30-to-1 ratio, Walters compared the weakest pot of the '70s to the strongest pot of this decade. As a review of research on marijuana potency in the July 2008 issue of the journal Addiction notes, "There is enormous variation in potency, within a given year, from sample to sample," such that "cannabis users may be exposed to greater variation of cannabis potency in a single year...than over years or decades."

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Smithsonian Institution's photostream

Description : Lee and Renee Harris pose on Easter morning in New York City. Creator/Photographer

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Hell of a year (so far)

Revealed! The most incredible string of words you've never heard before. Plus: Bill O'Reilly loses

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

It is nearly summertime in the Year of Our Google, and here in the golden land known as California the following startling and once-inconceivable lament can now be heard: Dammit, with gas zooming toward five bucks a gallon and airlines doubling fares and charging me for a single checked bag, how the hell am I going to afford to travel to all my gay friends' legal weddings across the state this summer?

Please note the historic power therein. Because such a peculiar, momentous string of words hath never before been uttered by man. Or woman. Or LGBT. Or "Other."

Wait, it gets better. For it is also a time when people are gathering 'round the water cooler and the coffee shop and the DailyKos and saying, gosh, I can't decide if this articulate, thoughtful, deeply intelligent black presidential candidate is merely great, really great, or perhaps something extraordinary, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of luminous, wisdom-bearing president who will drive a stake deep into the miserable road we've been racing down and pivot the nation around it like a skier plants a pole to make a spectacular turn.

Please note that historic power here as well, and not only because such a statement is often followed by one that says, oh and by the way, that powerhouse, smart woman? She would've made a terrific president too, solid and effective, and what an astonishing thing that the race between them was so close, and so impressive and so well received, and how incredible to see the ripples of excitement and hope course throughout the world when it was all finally decided.

Honey, grab the camera. Hell appears to be completely frozen over. Wait, better switch to video mode, because I believe I see some pigs flying, too. What a thing. Also: cool camera.

What else? Well, they're holding the Olympics in China, perhaps the most oppressive and schizophrenic and surveillance-crazy major world power of all, a baffling and hugely polluted megaplace which might very well have its paranoid, dictatorial heart forcibly cracked open by the intense gaze of the world media, which in turn might give humble, battered Tibet an unexpected final shot at freedom and independence — or at the very least, international sympathy and a little less carnage and perhaps some free wi-fi in the Lhasa Starbucks.

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The Purchase Price

Can governments copyright laws? Should they?

Principals for a new era
by Cory Doctorow

In setting out principles for thinking about copyright in this new age of technological access to the law, I'm not going to focus here on existing copyright doctrine. Rather I'd like to look at what the essential freedoms are in relationship to law. These freedoms are the ones that everyone ideally needs to have to consult and make use of "the law"; my argument is that computer and Internet technologies enable us to go much further in ensuring them than ever before. Think of them as guiding principles.

* The right to access: First and most fundamentally, people need to be able to get at the law. This puts a basic initial duty on the government not merely to publish the law but to publish it online in accessible formats with the right metadata, so that people can find it and know what it is. We shouldn't exclusively rely on the government, any more than we relied on it exclusively in the 19th century. But governmental online publication is the first step, the one that makes the rest possible.

* The right to distribute: Once primary legal information is online, anyone should be able to pick it up and republish it as they see fit. That could be coordinated with other materials in larger collections, it could be pushed out to mobile devices, it could be reformatted or sliced and diced in some clever new way. Law shouldn't get in the way of people who are taking it on themselves to publish it.

* The right to extract: Then there's the intermingling problem. Anyone has to be free to do what Richard Peters did: to extract the public-domain legal materials and reproduce them. This is a strong principle, and needs to override any voluntary agreements to the contrary. That is, a private publisher shouldn't be able to require that you give this right up if you get the legal materials under digital rights media management with a clickwrap contract. It shouldn't matter that you click "I agree not to tell people what the law is." You should still be free to tell people what the law is.

* The right not to extract: The flip-side of this principle is important, too. You shouldn't be able to make things hard to extract. No one should have to write a parser to strip out that green sentence from the midst of all the red that surrounds it. To the extent that copyrighted material has been so intermingled with public-domain legal material as to make it a significant challenge or to require significant work to extract the underlying material, there should be a right to redistribute the collection as a whole. Whatever the most accessible version of the law is, you have a right to use that version.

One might object that this rule erases the incentive to make annotations. On the contrary, it provides an incentive to make your annotations cleanly, with a clear layer separation between the primary materials that are the law and the secondary annotations that help people understand the law.

* The right to cite: Finally, there's citation. Anyone, of course, is free to use the citations themselves; Oregon basically concedes this one. But to the extent that a citation system becomes a standard (and especially where government requires you to use a particular citation system), anyone should be able to reproduce the necessary citation information as part of their own materials. (West has sued companies that want to reproduce what's called "star pagination"; that is, little flags in the text or the opinion that show you whenever the West case number changes. They've won in one federal appeals court and lost in another.) Otherwise, a standard citation system allows its creator to assert de facto copyright control over the underlying legal materials.

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Pelosi

Competition puts homeopathy on trial

Want to win £10,000? Then prove that homeopathy works in proper clinical trials in which half the patients receive the treatment, half receive a placebo, and no one knows till the end who got what.

The challenge was issued on Monday by Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, UK, and science author Simon Singh, in the wake of what they call a smear campaign against them in response to their book Trick or Treatment, which explores the scientific evidence behind complementary remedies. "We're saying to homeopaths, 'put up or shut up'," says Singh.

The pair are not against complementary remedies. Of those examined in their book, 36 worked for particular conditions - such as St John's wort for mild depression - but homeopathy was not among them.

Homeopaths seem in no hurry to take up the offer. "We have nothing to prove, and certainly not to people with closed minds," says Steve Scrutton of the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths.

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Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal

Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU and liberal blogs are uniting

Contact: Liz Rose (202) 675-2312 media@dcaclu.org
For Immediate Release: June 18, 2008

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It's moving that fast. If we don't stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lyman, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, "The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration's assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They're American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them."

Lust for freedom can lead to some pretty strange bedfellows.

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Ten best lightsaber mashups in all of Youtubedom

Comics about China earthquake

Posted by Xeni Jardin, June 19, 2008 5:01 AM | permalink

Beijing-based graphic novelist Coco Wang has produced a moving series of "Earthquake Strips" about the recent (well, really, ongoing) disaster in China. Link (thanks, Marianne Shaneen)