sfarber

While we were wacthing sundry things like the domestic horror of the loss of a dozen miners in West Virginia, the ongoing horrors in Iraq and a possible death-vigil for Israeli PM Sharon… Russia and Ukraine were having a conflict over the provision by Russia of natural gas to Ukraine (Russia supplies around a third of natural gas used by the former Soviet Republic). At one point, the Russians dramatically televised the act of their gas monopoly (“Gazprom”) turning off the valves sending gas into Ukraine. Well, it appears, via our comrades at Pravda, that a compromise has been reached....

One gets cases such as the “up or down vote on whether we are a dictatorship” a/k/a Padilla v. Hanft, or whether an American citizen picked up in the United States can be held at the sole whim of the President. The Supreme Court granted the government’s request to move Mr. Padilla from military to civilian custody, hinting as this LaLa Times piece suggests, that the Government’s cynical move of indicting Padilla after refusing to do so for years somehow “moots” the case. We’ll see…

Not good news out of the Middle East: Israeli PM Ariel Sharon has suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and is fighting for his life at an Israeli hospital. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has assumed the duties of acting Prime Minister. It doesn’t look good. Certainly, Sharon’s political life is probably over. Hopefully, he’ll recover from this, though the condition he is in sounds grave. The Unseen Editor forwards these items that some in Gaza fired shots in the air in celebration or are otherwise gleeful… perhaps these are “isolated extremists…” and then again, maybe Hamas isn’t the frontrunner in upcoming...

Suggested in comments to the last post, Gary Farber has been on a tear on the issue of the recent revelations concerning the machinations of Our Government ‘s efforts to protect us from swarthy jihadist bogeymen (largely of its creation) with respect to its evidently iimproved technical abilities to monitor virtually every communication that can be monitored… this is just his latest installment. Scary s*&^. And given the lethal combination of (1) a corrupt to the core ruling party in control of all branches of government; (2) a complicit press, (3) a moribund opposition party, (4) gerrymandered districts, (5) less...

In San Antonio, Texas, at a photo-op with wounded troops from the Iraq campaign (who otherwise don’t officially exist) the President staunchly defended the recently disclosed practice of wire-tapping, eavesdropping, listening in and otherwise God knows what associated with domestic telephone calls. Unsurprisingly, the President insisted that it was only international calls to the United States from known Al Qaeda operatives, and that “real Americans” had nothin’ to worry about, unless they were gettin’ qollect calls from Qaeda! This would be somewhat reassuring to crusty gadflies (like m’self) who are coming to mistrust this Government’s stated desire to heed, protect,...

Happy last day of 2005, everybody, the first year of the rest of the Bush Administration. I have a discussion of brush-clearing over at American Street; note the milestone– the President has managed to spend 365 days on vacation at his Texas hobby ranch in the last five years… The “war president” who has deemed the Bill of Rights as too dangerous to actually uphold because of the serious existential threat presented by a smallish criminal gang… (more dangerous, he implies, than either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia) hasn’t deemed it too dangerous to spend over 20% of his presidency...

An international panel will be re-assessing Iraq’s recent elections, taking particular note of complaints made by Sunnis to the effect that as a result of pre-election assassinations, intimidations and that sort of thing, the Iraqi elections weren’t exactly… “fair.” A U.N. monitor had already declared the Iraqi elections “good enough”… The big winners, thus far, were, surprise surprise, Shiite religious extremist parties, promising Sharia law as fast as it can be imposed; in second place were the Kurds, who want… as little to do with the rest of the Iraqi state as possible (and have their own pashmurga militias to...

The never ending saga of Jose Padilla the only American citizen ever to be picked up in the United States and held (for over three years now) entirely at the whim of the President takes yet another turn, as the Bush Administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and overturn a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals order precluding moving Padilla from military to civilian custody pending the Supreme Court’s decision on whether or not to review the Fourth Circuit’s own earlier decision in Jose Padilla v. C.T. Hanft denying Padilla’s habeas corpus application by reversing a lower court...

In this assessment of the wage and benefit package reached by the Transit Workers Union Local 100 after last week’s crippling New York City transit strike, the New York Times concludes that the union got the better of the deal. This is a somewhat interesting assessment, given that the union walked away from the table and the commuters of New York when the wage offer was 10 1/2% over three years. After a painful strike in which each union member lost 6 days pay the wage gain was (wait for it)… 11% over three years. The big sticking point, of...

Yes! And it counts! With apologies to Marv Albert, we give you this account of the CIA– the agency that proved so brilliant at assessing the extent of Saddam’s vast cache of weapons of mass destruction (recall its former director saying that the presence of such weapons was a slam dunk)– was given authority to randomly pick up people off the streets of the world under suspicion of being swarthy and then spiriting them off to be tortured at some neutral third country under contract to the Company, and is now… wait for it… investigating itself. Note that one of...