Politics

This is a video of a presentation at the TED conference by Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, about how the growth of squatter cities represents the cities of the future, as a growing percentage of the world’s population will live in such cities. I find it fascinating how such extra-legal cities which tend to operate beyond the fringes of the law, are places of considerable freedom and opportunity despite their poverty. Another similar book is Ian Lambot and Greg Girard’s City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon City, about the squatter city of Kowloon Walled City on the peninsula south of Hong Kong, where squatters developed their own systems of property rights and rules in the absence of government intervention.

The lunatics at Focus on the Family want people to pray for rain on Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. This is absurd on multiple levels–not only does nothing fail like prayer, but how on earth do they consider this to be a remotely ethical or rational thing to do? Why not just pray that Obama doesn’t get elected? Or follow the pattern with Supreme Court justices, and pray for death? (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) UPDATE (August 12, 2008): Focus on the Family has pulled the video from their site, claiming that it was all just a joke, as the Rocky Mountain News reports: ...

Mississippi coroner Steven Hayne, whose incompetent and dishonest work has been exposed in numerous articles by Radley Balko at The Agitator, will be cut off from future work–but only after he completes a backlog of 400-500 autopsies in the next 90 days. That’s more than double the number of annual autopsies per year per coroner according to the National Association of Medical Examiners, and he’s typically done 1,500 per year. The NAME says a coroner shouldn’t do more than 250 a year, and will not certify any coroner who does over 350 a year. Balko points out how inept and dishonest Mississippi’s government and newspapers have been in dealing with Hayne. Mississippi is not a state I ever want to visit, let alone live in. UPDATE (September 7, 2008): Radley Balko has tracked down a file of complaints about Hayne going back to the early nineties which shows, among other things, that the government in Mississippi was well aware of what Hayne was doing, and used him because he gave them the results they wanted. UPDATE (September 10, 2008): Balko has an update to his September 7 post that corrects a statement about Dr. Emily Ward, Mississippi’s last official state medical examiner. ...

The Smoking Gun has a collection of documents about the government’s case against suicidal government bioweapons researcher Bruce Ivins that is fascinating. Apparently he engaged in an “edit war” on the Wikipedia entry for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (which my mother belonged to). He regularly posted negative information there, and became angry when it was deleted. He claimed that KKG had labeled him an “enemy” and issued a “fatwah” against him, and he broke into a KKG sorority house to steal a KKG handbook during his postdoc fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill. The documents also show ties between Ivins and the American Family Affiliation, a conservative Christian group known for threatening boycotts against companies that do things like support gay rights, and with pro-life groups. He was a regular user of pseudonyms and multiple email addresses. The documents show that he was clearly a very disturbed individual. (Previously.) UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Ivins’ coworker Meryl Nass lays out the case for reasonable doubt about Ivins’ involvement at her blog. Hume’s Ghost points out in the comments that the anthrax attacks were used to help justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the anthrax apparently originated there. One of the Glenn Greenwald articles Hume’s Ghost alludes to, about false claims that the anthrax contained bentonite which tied it to Iraq, may be found here. A nice quote from that article: ...

White House officials pressured the FBI to blame the 2001 anthrax attacks on al Qaeda, even after it was already known that the anthrax was a strain that came from U.S. Army laboratories, according to a retired senior FBI official. Just another example of Bush administration deception. Historical Comments Hume's Ghost (2008-08-06): Seen this yet?The bit about Suskind's research assistant getting detained is interesting. After his first book about Bush, the book's main subject Paul O'Neal was investigated for breaking the law (he was cleared.) I forgot to make note of it in my post, but we do already know that this administration has stepped up its surveillance effforts of journalists when it comes to pursuing leaks - which is precisely what Suskind is good at getting ... as indicated by the absolute jaw-dropper in the link.I also watched Suskind on Olbermann this evening. Two of his sources have come out saying they didn't tell Suskind what they told him, but he kind of laughed that off because he says he has the taped conversations. ...

Upon learning that he was about to be the target of a prosecution for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, U.S. government biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. Ivins became a suspect after it was discovered that he had failed to report anthrax contaminations at his lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2002. In late 2008, he was ordered to stay away from a social worker who had counseled him, Jean Duley, who would have testified against him at his trial. In Duley’s application for a protective order, she said that Ivins had stalked her and threatened to kill her. Ivins worked at the same lab where a prior “person of interest” in the case, Stephen Hatfill, also worked. Hatfill was cleared of involvement with the attacks and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Justice Department after he sued for harassment and privacy act violations. Hatfill also won a $10 million libel judgment against Vanity Fair and Reader’s Digest for an article by Donald Foster which claimed that Hatfill’s writings and travels connected him to the anthrax attacks. Ivins’ attorney claims that he was innocent, but if that were the case, wouldn’t his response have been more like Hatfill’s? Perhaps, perhaps not. Private investigator and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, who was also a spokesperson for Hatfill, said on Friday that news organizations and the public should be “deeply skeptical” about any notion that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer unless and until solid evidence is brought forth.“Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that because this guy committed suicide, he must be the anthrax killer,” Mr. Clawson said. “That is a lousy premise. The pressure of these F.B.I. investigations on individuals is phenomenal, and it is quite likely that this guy cracked under that pressure but had nothing to do with the killings.” ...

Ed Brayton gives a summary of Radley Balko’s list of tough questions for the candidates. It’s a pity that our mass media is unlikely to ask any of them. (Yet kudos to Fox News for publishing Radley Balko’s columns asking them–they seem to be a whole lot better on the web than they are on television.) Brayton quotes the questions for McCain about how serious he is about cutting corporate pork when he personally profits from it (the laws that mandate alcohol be sold through distributors like Hensley & Co, where his wife got her fortune) and how he reconciles his support for the drug war with the fact that his wife was permitted to avoid any criminal penalties for her prescription drug problems. For Obama, he selected as favorites how Obama plans to pay for his proposed civilian national security force, how he reconciles his support for the drug war with his own past use of marijuana and cocaine, and why he supported the farm bill and supports ethanol subsidies. I think Ed clearly picked out the best questions Balko asked of McCain, but here are a couple other questions for Obama that I particularly liked: In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo “an important inducement for change,” a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn’t the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn’t it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba? In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one’s position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you’d actually roll back the federal government?Balko asked a question of McCain about the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold), which I think did serious damage to the First Amendment and protects incumbent politicians by prohibiting any corporation (including nonprofits) or by an unincorporated entity using any corporate funds from running ads critical or supportive of a candidate within 30 days of a primary or within 60 days of a general election. I agree McCain should be asked tough questions about his apparent disrespect for political speech, but I didn’t particularly care for the specific question Balko came up with. ...

I saw two articles this morning which I think invite comparison. First, Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of PGP Corporation, says people visiting China should take laptops with no data, or encrypt what data they have: Travelers carrying smart cell phones, blackberries or laptop computers could unwittingly be offering up sensitive personal or business information to officials who monitor state-controlled telecommunications carriers, Dunkelberger said. He said that without data encryption, executives could have business plans or designs pilfered, while journalists’ lists of contacts could be exposed, putting sources at risk. ...

A parent complained about Sarah Brannen’s book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, about same-sex marriage, that was in the children’s book section in the Douglas County Library system in Colorado. Librarian Jamie Larue wrote an excellent, kind, and thoughtful response to the library patron about why the library is not going to move or remove the book.

At Rational Rant is an excellent three-part critique of a document that’s been floating around the Internet which claims to support the case that America was intended by its founders to be a Christian nation. In fact, the document is a mish-mash of fabricated quotations and misinformation. Rational Rant has gone to the trouble of digging up the details and even comparing four different versions of the document. “Dubious Documents”: part one, part two, part three