President Obama Releases Secret War on Terror Legal Documents

I just posted this over at PrawfsBlawg, as part of signing off from my month as a Guest Blogger.

Law Review Article Submission Season Stories of Inspiration: Written Apology from the YLJ!

I just posted this over at PrawfsBlawg as part of my Guest Blogging this month, about how The Yale Law Journal apologized to me in writing ...

Operation Tough Love

I just posted this over at PrawfsBlawg, as part of my Guest Blogging this month, about an Arizona sheriff's roundup of deadbeat dads, and staying in on Friday nights as an aspect of my own two-city commuter marriage - my own Operation Tough Love.

Law Professor Travel Budgets - Ritz, or Rats?

I posted this over at PrawfsBlawg as part of my Guest Blogging this month.

USA Today Says Don't Investigate Bush Administration "Excesses" (read: alleged monstrous crimes)

I just posted this piece over at PrawfsBlawg as part of my Guest Blogger duties this month.

Should Obama Veto His Own Bi-Curious Stimulus Package?

I've posted another one over at Prawfs Blawg - check out out here.

Thank God We're Not Discussing the Michael-Phelps-Smoking-Dope Story!

I've Guest Blogging over at PrawfsBlawg this month (there's a link to it here on Foley's Zumutung). So I will be linking here to some of those posts.
My inaugural post, "Thank God We're Not Discussing the Michael-Phelps-Smoking-Dope Story" can be found here

"If U Seek Amy"

Say it out loud, fast!

Oh. My. God!!!

Parents are trying to have Britney Spears's new song of this title banned from the radio. It's too much for kids to hear it. Especially if said seductively. By Britney Spears.

I bet these same parents don't worry about news reports about war (wait - our government and compliant corporate media sanitize those) or if their kids play video war games, such as Call of Duty, which is very vivid and violent.

Violence and hatred and mutilation: OK.

Sex and love: Bad.

(Learning to spell: Bad.)

Our society has serious problems with violence and militarism, including violence against women (and literacy).

Any questions?

Obama - For the Children - But What About Us Adults?

If there is one trope I'm sick of, and get sicker of every year as I march upright toward the ravages of aging and my inevitable death (financial tip: Bet on Your Own Death), it's when people justify their actions by saying they are doing them "for the children." We fight against street drugs and fill up our prisons "for the children." We wage war and kill lots of people "for the children."

Obama announces that this is why he ran for president in his letter to his daughters, published in hard-hitting PARADE Magazine. (Why not just leave the letter under their pillows? That seems a whole lot easier than publishing it in PARADE.)

The hidden agenda has been exposed. Obama is President "for the children." But what about the adults?

Why don't adults register in our political and self-justifying rhetoric?

Are we cut off and cast adrift at age 18? (Is that what Obama is really telling his daughters?)

Last I checked, there were more adults in this country than children. Let's do something For the Adults.

Because if you take care of the adults, the adults are in a much better position to take care of the children.

Call it "trickle down home economics."

More on Disintegration of USA by 2010

I find this idea really interesting, which I posted about yesterday.

One thing to focus on is, What Follows? When people hear "USA will disintegrate," they get, I bet, visions of the apocalypse. That there will be nothing after. Or, they can't envision the after - they only envision the meltdown/destruction. I had the sense that people thought this regarding the meltdown of Wall Street last fall and of Detroit.

But something always follows. That is life. The change that follows could be good and should not be feared reflexively. For example, the Big Bailout (and past bailouts such as the savings and loan crisis of about 20 years ago) makes it clear that our financial system doesn't really work. It's like a young adult who says he's living on his own but gets saved every few years by his parents, who come in and give him money and pay off his debts, saying, "This is the last time, Junior!" Something's not working. Time to let the scheme crumble, perhaps, and see what follows? Ditto for Detroit. If it crumbled, would smaller car companies take root and build cars that are actually good? There would be a whole lot of skilled auto industry labor around. Entrepreneurs could swoop in .... Call it creative destruction.

So what would post-USA North America look like? The Russian academic, Igor Panarin, who proposed this idea sees the USA breaking into the following countries: Atlantic America (the Northeast, broadly construed); The Texas Republic (many Southern states); The Central North American Republic; The California Republic (really the West Coast); Alaska; and Hawaii.

Note: Prof Panarin says this will come after a fractious civil war. Can we avoid that? The whole breakup will start when cash-starved states will start withholding money from the Fed, leading to their secession from the Union.

Back to my point. What would the cultures of these new republics be like? What would their Constitutions be like? It could be a time of great creativity. I think our Constitution now is showing signs of age. Scholars do not agree on which interpretive method to use to interpret it. It's hard to know what the Framers actually meant. Time for a new one before we end up in any further in a Bible situation - scholars who seem more like high priests and sages tell us that the text doesn't mean what it says, that it means something different - something that sounds suspiciously close to the priest or sage's own broader moral, cultural, and political agenda. It's clay. Which rights would survive, which would go by the wayside, and which new ones would arise in the new constitutions?

Which region would fare best? Take economics. Would Bible-belters have a stronger economy than the East or West coasts? Would teaching Creationism in schools and blocking out Evolution harm the nurturing of tomorrow's scientists, who are necessary for innovation? Would people move, self-selecting which region to live in, based on cultural values? Would any of the new republics build Berlin Walls to prevent brain drain?

Let the games begin. This might solve our culture wars. We could see, literally, which group's ideas make for a better country. Indeed, might this sort of competition and experimentation and innovation and risk-taking have been what the USA founders actually intended all along - a creativity in self-rule that a strong federal government has squelched?

See you in 2010?

USA disintegrates by 2010?

An interesting news story on CNN no less about a Russian professor's predicting the disintegration of the US and its formation into regional blocks/countries by 2010.
It's a big story over there.

Who knows? What's interesting is that in the past 10 years we've seen some fairly uncommon things:

- impeachment of a president
- 9/11
- US aggressive war violating international law
- stolen elections
- outright government spying on American citizens
- an African American elected president
- economic meltdown
- non-impeachment of a president and cronies who have committed numerous crimes, including war crimes

This is an off the cuff list. I may add as other oddities come to mind. Anyone care to add to the list?

Mission Accomplished?

Bush started his term in early 2005 trying to shovel (subtly, perhaps) Americans' money to Wall Street (read: "Privatizing Social Security"). He failed.

Bush is ending his term by shoveling Americans' money to Wall Street (and not so much to workers in Detroit) - directly and without subtlety.

Mission accomplished, after all?

Israel's New Year - New War

Israel has been pounding Gaza with an aerial bombardment, in response to rocket attacks by Hamas. Israeli ground forces appear poised to invade.

Israeli official Ehud Barak has promised "a war to the bitter end."

We have to ask, What does Israel expect to accomplish here?

Surely not peace.

Tit for tat - revenge - doesn't work. Every person who loses a neighbor or loved one or who him- or herself is injured will feel justified in avenging that harm. Anyone harmed by the avenger's act will likewise feel justified in exacting violent revenge.

Israel's use of military force with its certain "collateral damage" has been creating and promises to create such victims, guaranteeing that the cycle of revenge will continue. The same goes for Hamas's rocket fire.

Israel's goal of a "war to the bitter end" is idiotic. Wars cannot be won, anymore. There will always be someone with a rocket or gun or grenade, or home-made bomb, or with the means to punch a hole in a railroad car carrying poison, or who can ram his car into a crosswalk crowded with pedestrians, who can keep on killing. That person might not even be from one of the combatant nations. It is reported that Iranians are signing up to become suicide bombers against Israel.

Look at Israel's 2006 war. What did it solve? Look at the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which slog on.

When will Israel's and Hamas's killing of innocent people end?

When both sides end their violence.

It's as simple as that. Anyone who says it's more complex is, ultimately (and perhaps unconsciously), promoting violence.

Barring international intervention or a mutual, simultaneous cease fire, it will be up to one side to end its own use of violence.

That will be the most courageous, the most intelligent, the most moral, the most civilized side. The side with the truest strength.

That side then can say, "We are no longer using violence. We call on our opposites to stop, too: any further violence by them will not be defensive, but aggressive."

And any such aggressors should be punished by use of criminal process in civilized courts following the rule of law.

When the killing stops, the work of securing human rights and the ability of everyone in that region to live freely and to flourish must begin. For real, this time.

Which side will adopt this new consciousness and start the march toward peace?

The Dogs - and Shoes - of War

Here’s a story with almost everything wrong about reporting on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq (I don’t call it a “war” if I can help it):

"Iraqi reporter throws shoes at Bush, calls him dog"

Note the last sentence:

“The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein triggered years of sectarian bloodshed and insurgency in Iraq, killing tens of thousands.”

This makes it appear that the U.S. military action was simply intended to topple a dictator, when the stated purpose was finding WMD (which were never found), and most likely other geostrategic reasons, such as securing Iraqi oil and other riches and resources for U.S. companies - see my piece, "The Profit-driven War". Perhaps worse, this story makes it look as if the U.S. military itself didn’t kill anyone - the sectarian bloodshed between Iraqis, and the insurgency (the impolite response to U.S. occupation force) is what killed those "tens of thousands" of Iraqis! It's really all their fault! This, of course, is simply untrue, and there was plenty of Iraqi blood that was shed from U.S. munitions fired by U.S. troops (and "contractors" (read: mercenaries)).

Why such a vague number of Iraqi dead? The U.S., which sought to count every last hair on every last head of every last victim of 9/11, using sophisticated DNA technology when possible, hasn't bothered to count the Iraqi dead. Nor have U.S. media. Instead, U.S. officials and their right-wing pom-pom boys generally claim agnosticism about the Iraqi dead - and attack the results of any effort to count them, as seen in the response a few years ago to the John Hopkins University - sponsored study published in British medical journal The Lancet.

"Tens of thousands" - close enough for us well-intentioned Americans, who at worst merely "trigger" negative events that somehow just spiral out of our helpless little hands.

(Here's a link to a National Journal story about this study and the response to it, from early 2008.
I don't purport to say whether the Hopkins study is correct or not - the controversy swirling around it as well as around counting the Iraqi dead raises the real question: Why won't U.S. officials count how many people they've killed in our name?? Let's have a real body count - and pay reparations to the Iraqis.)

Gov Blagovejevich - he's just kidding around

Everyone's talking about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. (That's because they can't write about him - can't spell his name.)
I say his defense his simple: He was joking. Because who would say all this stuff? This is the kind of stuff I would say as a joke to my friends if I ever were governor. That's more believable than anything I've heard.
And a guy with a helmut haircut has to be kidding on some level.