Clear is no more.
Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.
At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.
I guess you'll have to get into line with the rest of us unwashed masses.
Unless things have substantially changed, we should not expect the "official" Pentagon story of Maersk Alabama Captain Richard Phillips' rescue to bear any resemblance to what actually happened.
We've already gotten what sounds like conflicting accounts about how Phillips' life was in imminent danger with guns pointed at back, but then he also jumped overboard, enabling the SEALs to take out all the bad guys. All except for the one who had already surrendered so someone could look after his injured hand.
Lindsey Beyerstein sounds a little skeptical too:
The on-scene Navy commander aboard the USS Bainbridge reportedly gave the order to fire because the hostage's life was suddenly in danger. If that's true, then of course the SEALs did the right thing.
Despite the blanket coverage of the SEALs who fired the shots, very little has been reported about the evidence that moved the commander to order the shooting. So far, nobody has explained why the commander decided that the hostage was in jeopardy at that particular moment.
The standoff was dragging on and there was intense political pressure to resolve the situation. Maybe he just seized an opportunity to get three clean kills.
I'm not saying I'm not glad the guys was rescued, just that high-fiving ourselves for what sounds like the shooting of 3 armed teenagers under our control just might turn out to be a little premature.
In what seems to be your standard fawning profile of CIA chief Leon Panetta, SF Chronicle Washington Bureau correspondent Zachary Coile notes Panetta's response to critics of "rendition."
Panetta has drawn some criticism from the left for saying he would continue renditions of terrorist suspects to foreign countries for questioning, as long as there were assurances the detainees would not be tortured. He said Wednesday that Obama plans to limit the use of renditions.
"If it's someone we are interested in, there is no purpose to rendering anyone - particularly if it's a high-value target," he said.
Nothing too noteworthy there. The controversy over rendition has a lot of nuances and there is a genuine dispute amongst civil rights advocates as to whether the Obama administration's views on rendition are as heinous as were those of the Bush administration.
It is indeed troubling what comes out in the following graf:
Panetta reiterated his view that the United States does not need to use waterboarding or other aggressive interrogation tactics to get information from suspects. The president has the power to order the use of harsh methods, but Panetta wouldn't recommend it.
Okay, what seems a little unclear here is whether Coile asked Panetta if the President has the power to order torture, or Panetta simply volunteered this as an expansion of the remark on the lack of a need to torture.
Last I checked, the President can claim all he wants the power to torture someone, but in exercising it, he would then be guilty committing a war crime.
So, did I miss a staff meeting or something? I understand Obama has made it clear as late as Tuesday night that "we don't torture," but is that just because he's choosing not to, or because it's plainly illegal?
What is Panetta talking about?
In Tuesday night's speech, President Obama closed a section about properly accounting for the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with this declaration:
For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.
My first thought was: "great, so when do we start seeing the pictures of caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base?"
It looks like he wasn't just talking about money after all:
News organizations will be allowed to photograph the homecomings of America's war dead under a new Pentagon policy, defense and congressional officials said Thursday.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to allow photos of flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base, Del., if the families of the fallen troops agree, the officials told The Associated Press.
Unfortunately for war cheerleaders, things are going to get a lot more "expensive" before this is over.
h/t Talking Points Memo
Glenn writes:
Or he is fully aware that he spent the last eight years degrading our discourse with exactly that tactic and is now purposely projecting what he himself did onto Obama?
Yes.
via Salon: Glenn Greenwald
To hear it from Bobby Jindal, Comrade Obama is going to spend all your money on some newfangled magneto-electric trains:
It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.
Now, I'm sure Mr. Jindal doesn't get out much or perhaps even watch our electronic televisual screens and what have you, but someone should inform him that the fracking Chinese already have the "magnetic levitation" lines of which he speaks, and that $8b couldn't build a maglev from Disneyland's parking structure to Katella Ave., much less to Las Vegas.
Oh, and while they're at it, they also ought to mention to him that if he and his lovely family ever want to visit Hawaii or hang with fellow religious nut Sarah Palin, someone will need to monitor the frackin' volcanoes.
So Rupert decides to apologize for the imfamous "chimpanzee" cartoon depicting the author of the stimulus package as the chimpanzee that went on a rampage in Connecticut last week and was ultimately shot and killed by the cops.
Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.
Rev. Al and a lot of folks both black and white were understandably upset by the implication that President Obama be shot, I guess so a better stimulus package could be written.
I can assure you - without a doubt - that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation.
One thing I don't get is how you're supposed to pick that up from the cartoon. The whole thing read to me like a non-sequitur where cartoonist Sean Delonas just drew 2 cops standing over a dead chimpanzee and then filled in the word balloon with whatever happened to be the news of the day.
Here's some possible captions:
Well, it looks like that Global Warming thing is over...
So much for bipartisanship...
Finally, the Knicks can take the Eastern Conference this season.
See, anyone can play.
Another thing I don't get is why editors at the Post decided to turn an easy opportunity to defuse the situation into a swipe at Sharpton and virtually anybody on the Post's enemies list:
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Really? So the Post is doing so well that they can afford to indulge in the exercise of pissing off some or all of its readership just to look like they aren't capitulating to Al Sharpton?
I would think that Rupert would be interested in any high-profile activities undertaken by one of his less-than-profitable subsidiaries that stood to not only maintain that status, but also endanger his more profitable ones. That is, unless he's not so much the pragmatic moneyman his apologists claim him to be.
But that's not all I don't get. If it's the position of Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, et. al., that Delona's cartoon was tantamount to a call for assassination, why aren't they going after this guy:
He's going to destroy this country and we're either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.
That guy is well-known lunatic Alan Keyes, but unfortunately, I haven't heard anything about Al Sharpton picketing him.
Wil Wheaton got an early preview of the new Watchman movie, and to put it bluntly: it rawwwks.
Hear me now, my fellow geeks: you have nothing to worry about. Watchmen is fucking awesome.
One thing to note:
For the next two hours and forty-five minutes, I gasped, I cheered, I applauded, I was stunned and I was blown away.
WTF? 2:45?
Anyway, after 20+ years, I'm finally getting around to reading it, so don't anybody tell me how it ends.
H/T Candleblog
For what may be the first time, the Letters to the Editor section of the local paper proved useful other than as a quick way to raise my blood pressure and ruin breakfast with my wife.
In yesterday's exciting episode of DoMMeSTC, I referred to what I call the Unified Theory of American Conservatism: namely, that we must govern in such a way that nobody ever get what they don't rightfully deserve.
Revan Tranter of Berkeley, reminds us that none other than the esteemed J.K. Galbraith once said:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Interestingly enough, despite nearly 34,000 Google matches for this quote, it doesn't appear to have a source.
Not to sound too arch, but UK Secretary of Justice Jack Straw has vetoed a Freedom of Information request to produce the minutes of legal discussions held in the runup to the Iraq War.
Despite a ruling from the Information Tribunal supporting the publication of the minutes, Straw chose a first-time ever veto rather than appeal. His "justification" leaves a lot to be desired:
"There is a balance to be struck between openness and maintaining aspects of our structure of democratic government," he said.
"The damage that disclosure of the minutes in this instance would do far outweighs any corresponding public interest in their disclosure."
Why do I feel like the damage would have more to do with the revelation that the Government was acting against the wishes of its people than a desire to protect the integrity of future Cabinet meetings?
Atrios nails the Unified Theory of American Conservatism:
But one day I hope this country grows up and recognizes that the fear that maybe someone is getting something I'm not and they don't deserve shouldn't be the primary philosophy of governance.
Oh, but for the GOP, it is. On every domestic policy issue that will come down from the White House, the core objection raised by the Right will be that someone might get something they don't deserve.
via Eschaton
Salon is running "Yes on 8" adds in their RSS feed headers. Booo....Turns out, "Yes on 8" bought a crapload of Google AdSense spots, and hit a bunch of lefty/tech sites. A Google search shows that a lot of people are pissed about it, both Google for trying to play both sides, and "Yes on 8" for contaminating their site.
Without our knowledge or consent, Google displayed political propaganda on this website today as part of our participation in its AdSense advertising program. This is contrary to our own advertising policy.TPM got nailed, so Josh had to put up a note explaining their policy on ads.
We follow this policy because it is essential to preserving the editorial integrity of our product, which is news and information. Precisely because we are in the news and opinion business, advertising tied to ideas, issues or advocacy presents us with a particular challenge. If we reject ads that we disagree with, every ad we accept becomes, to one degree or another, a de facto endorsement. In other words, if we run ads only from candidates or causes we support, then the ad relationship also becomes an endorsement relationship. Even worse, a paid endorsement. That threatens the integrity of what we do -- which is to report the facts we find and explain the opinions we have.As I'm linking to this, the ad is still up on the TPM website, but you know what? I can respect that policy. We often get wound up when some network won't air an ad produced by a progressive group because the content supposedly violates some "advocacy" policy that only seems to apply to progressive advocacy. Unfortunately, it works both ways: if you want to maintain that kind of editorial integrity, you have to put with the stuff you disagree with as well.
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