now that's what i call alien technology

the most remarkable thing about this photo of an alleged UFO sighting in almaty, kazakhstan is not the classic-style flying saucers buzzing the city. it's that almaty is suddenly a city on a river. i guess those aliens can do anything.

messing with the blogroll

it's messing with the blogroll day. if anyone out there wants to suggest a site to add, please leave it in the comments. i promise i will look at any blog that is suggested, but make no promises about whether i will add it to the blogroll.

i'm contemplating a larger overhaul of the way i organize the links on the right. which probably means that it won't actually change any time soon. but i am thinking about it. just so you know.

i don't know jack

so the guy i once had dinner with might end up being prime minister of canada. i'm an american, so my official position is that i find canadian politics too confusing and boring to follow. but unofficially, it's pretty interesting to see if a real upset actually happens in the north.

in three dee!

links as

you say "recession" i say tomato

this type of poll shows up whenever the economy starts to grow after a recession. it all comes down to different views on what the word "recession" means. economist define a recession to mean when the economy, as measured by the GDP, shrinks instead of grows. the public at large takes the word "recession" to mean a bad economy.

so there is no contradiction between economists saying that the u.s. is no longer in a recession and the u.s. public telling posters that they think it still is in one. technically, the public is wrong. whether the country is in a recession is a factual issue, not something that depends on a public opinion. but because the media regularly uses the word "recession" as a shorthand for "bad economy" (as opposed to just one measure of whether the economy is bad), it's not surprising that the public would come away with that impression.

shipped!

end obsessive checking of the "order status" page on the apple site, begin obsessive tracking at the fedex site.

tired of me talking about this yet? me too. so just give me my fucking burrito and i will shut up.

renounce what?

i don't think it's entirely clear that superman has u.s. citizenship to give up. superman was adopted as a baby by sam and molly kent. but was he legally adopted, or did the kents just informally take him in and raised him, pretending that he was their biological child? if it's the latter, superman's citizenship would be a fraud and he would not really be a legal citizen. if it's the former...

under currently law, superman would need a special adoption visa to enter the country. that visa would then become his path to citizenship. because krypton is not a signatory to the hague convention, little kal-el would need either an IR-3 or IR-4 visa. an IR-3 requires both parents to have met the child before s/he enters the U.S., and at least one parent must have an interview with the child at a u.s. consulate before they bring the child to the u.s. the IR-4 also involves a consular interview before the child enters the u.s. both the IR-3 and IR-4 visas are issued by that u.s. consulate in the foreign country of origin. the u.s. had no diplomatic relations with krypton and there were no u.s. consulates that could have issued either the IR-3 or IR-4 visa. also, no competent authority in the kryptonian government ever awarded custody or parental rights to the kents, so even if there were a consulate, the kal-el would not have been eligible for either visa.

at least that's how the process works now. on the other hand the IR-3 and IR-4 visas were created by the child and citizenship act of 2000. it's not clear to me what the process was in 1938, or even if there was any process in existence. international adoption by u.s. citizens did not happen in substantial numbers until after world war two, so there probably was not a formal framework for allowing foreign children to enter the country. however, under the immigration act of 1924 the u.s. would only legally admit the number of aliens equal to 2% of the total number of people from that country who were in the u.s. in 1890 per year. because there were zero kryptonians living in the u.s. in 1890, superman would have been completely excluded from legally emigrating to the u.s.

thus, superman is probably not a u.s. citizen. that is, unless he got in on one of the seven amnesty programs that congress passed since 1986. but if he did, i must have missed that issue. i was a pretty avid comic book reader between the late 80s and the mid-90s.

bibi's temper tantrum

benjamin netanyahu is not happy that hamas and fatah have finally reconciled saying: "The Palestinian Authority has to choose between peace with Israel and peace with Hamas."

for the past two years netanyahu has made it clear that he is not interested in negotiating a permanent peace agreement with the palestinian authority. his government has held no formal meetings to negotiate a peace plan with the PA.in fact, netanyahu's official position is to avoid negotiating a political settlement with the palestinians and instead support economic development in the west bank without giving the residents any political rights (what he calls his "economic peace plan"). the netanyahu government has also refused to enact a real freeze of settlement activities, which is required under the bush-era "road map", the last agreement relating to the peace process that israel signed with the palestinian authority.

if bibi is gives an "either deal with us, or deal with them" ultimatum to the palestinian authority, and then makes it clear that he won't deal with the PA, what else does he expect them to do?

surveying crazyland

surprise! the release of obama's long form birth certificate certificate of live birth, didn't seem to satisfy any of the birthers. here's a list of reactions. if you find any new ones, leave them in the comments:

1. yeah but where are his school records?

2. why did it take so long to release the long-form?

3. the long-form is fake because it doesn't call the president a "negro".

4. "But! Now we have a name, right? For the attending. Can anyone find out if he exists and how dead he is? Obama's wearing a dead Connecticut man's social security number. I'm sure the MD was chosen just as carefully."

5. he STILL hasn't released his birth certificate because a "certificate of birth" is NOT THE SAME as a "birth certificate". you know, just like how a "license to drive" is NOT THE SAME as a "driver's license"

6. the certificate does not list the nationality of the parents so it must be fake.

7. the certificate doesn't have a stamp on it, it doesn't list the birth place of his parents and doesn't give his height and weight so it must be fake.


8. it's a forgery by leon penetta, which is why on the same day they released the certificate, they announced that penetta is leaving the CIA so he can start forging obama's academic records. 


9. it's a forgery look at the typeface!

10. it's a forgery because the certificate calls him "Barack Hussein Obama II" and not "Barack Hussein Obama Jr." and also because the black lines bend on the edge but the green pattern does not. (added 4/27/2011, per dagger aleph's suggestion in the comments)

11. there's no baby footprint on the certificate and the hospital listed on the certificate is currently in a building that wasn't built until 1978. (added 4/28/2011)

12. the number on the certificate don't jive with the numbers on the birth certificates of some random twins who were born the next day in the same hospital. (added 4/28/2011)

13. the widow and son of the doctor who delivered obama don't remember the birth happening, a birth that they probably were not present at and would have been completely unremarkable at the time. (added 4/28/2011)

14. the certificate is fake because i can tell from the picture that all three signatures were signed by the same  rollball pen and rollerball pens did not exist until the 1980s. (added 4/28/2011)

15. there are layers on the pdf of the certificate, so it must be fake (added 4/29/2011)

wwcd?

now that obama has released a copy of his long-form birth certificate, any guesses what the crazies' next move will be? i bet it will be one of the following:

(1) insistence that the long-form certificate is forged (why else would it take them so long to release it if they didn't have the dept of treasury's best engravers working on a perfect forgery in the white house basement?)

(2) calls for an investigation of obama's alleged abuse of authority for being allowed to release a copy of the long-form certificate. to review: for the past few years the counter-birther argument has been to point out that the state of hawaii does not permit the release or copying of the full birth certificate. instead, if you were born in hawaii, you can request a certification of live birth, which is the legal equivalent to a birth certificate. so after all this time saying that producing a copy of the "long form birth certificate" is illegal, how did obama suddenly produce it today? the state of hawaii made an exception for him in light of the birther fervor. so why did they make a special exception for obama? what favors did hawaii get in return? surely a special counsel must be appointed to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to find out!

i'm betting it will be #2. or maybe both.

WHERE'S MY BURRITO!?! WHERE'S MY BURRITO!?!

on april 9th, i ordered an ipad 2 from the online apple store. the site warned me there would be a 2-3 week delay before it shipped, but i did it anyway because i didn't want to camp out at the apple store early in the morning and then have to settle for whatever they had in stock.¹ i was also kind of betting that i wouldn't really have to wait two weeks as supply problems with a new product tend to work out the longer the product is out. i figured that 2-3 weeks was a worst-case estimate and that really it would probably ship before that, or at least more like two weeks rather than three.

two weeks from april 9th was april 23rd. there's no sign of my ipad and the wait is killing me. killing me dead. i'm completely obsessed with the question of whether my ipad has shipped. every morning i wake up and check my email, hoping to find the message that says the ipad is on its way and every morning (so far) i am disappointed. i reload the "order status" page on the apple site several times a day and the status, "not yet shipped" has not changed.

the odd thing is that it wasn't too long ago that i didn't even want an ipad. when the first ipad came out, my reaction was: "this is just a really big harder-to-carry iphone/ipod touch." admittedly that was influenced by the fact that i was in a city in kazakhstan where wifi was rare and 3G non-existent. so i was well aware that an ipad would be all but useless where i was. but even when i came back it wasn't that appealing. then the ipad 2 came out, and this time i was in the country to be hit with all the hype. around that same time we figured out (thanks to the adoption tax credit and the huge drop in our income in 2010 from extended leaves of absences from work) that we were due a sizable tax refund. the timing was too perfect and i was sold.

but even when i decided i wanted an ipad and placed the order, i wasn't nearly as obsessed with it as i am now. actually, i wouldn't be totally surprised if it came, i fiddled with it for a little while and then moved on to something else. but until then, where's my freaking ipad!?!?!?!

---------------------
1-because of supply problems, apple is sending a small number of ipads to each apple store each morning and then they are sold on a first-come first-serve basis.

interview with a birther

a bunch of people have linked to this video of mike signorile attempting to reason with a birther:



what others seem to be getting from the video is how unreasonable and immune to rational discourse winston from alabama is in the video. but what i found most notable is how winston kept assuming that their disagreement over obama's birth certificate had to do with the fact that he was from alabama. again and again the caller defensively suggested that signorile thought that he or other alabamans were uneducated or stupid. winston kept coming back to that even when signorile made it clear that he wasn't saying anything about alabamans, but rather wanted to talk about the facts around obama's birth certificate.

it's fascinating to see the notion that "other people think they're better than me" seems to be a driving force in winston's beliefs about the issue. the facts about obama's birth or how birth certificates work under hawaiian law isn't going to convince a guy like winston. the facts have nothing to do with why he questions the president's origin. it's more visceral than logical.

(via memeorandum)

unexpected ron paul nostalgia

ron paul has been running for president as long as i've been voting for president. i remember in 1988, the first election for which i was eligible to vote, a friend made a serious pitch to get me to vote for paul. the friend sent me some pamphlet that said "the lesser of two evils is still evil". i still think that's a really great slogan for a third party candidate.

anyway, paul didn't stand a chance then and he doesn't stand a chance now. but this may be his last presidential campaign. next time we're probably going to have to settle for his son, who unlike the elder paul, seems to have no problem selling out to mainstream wingnuttia.

public policy poll

you don't have to know where it is to be against u.s. intervention in libya. the reasons to be against it have nothing to do with geography. i realize the implication is that americans are generally ignorant and uninformed. but i don't think there's anything wrong with the american public taking a default anti-military intervention stance. the burden of proof should always be on the bombers.

holy shit barack HUSSEIN obama failed to issue an easter proclaimation!

just like president george w bush, george h.w. bush, and ronald reagan, who also didn't issue an easter proclamation.

fox news has this tendency to freak out when president obama does exactly the same thing as his predecessors. things like using a teleprompter or appointing czars are among the things that all modern presidents do. and yet when obama does it somehow it proves he's an islamofascist socialist radical.

gay bashing just aint what it used to be

i'm not surprised that king & spalding did not want to be associated with the effort to defend DOMA. check out the home page on the  firm's web site:

they even have a special page noting their particular commitment to LGBT diversity which says:

King & Spalding is committed to having the brightest and most diverse lawyers it can find, including members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community. We work hard to foster and maintain an environment where our lawyers can provide the highest level of legal service while being true to themselves in the process. The firm's non-discrimination policy prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Further, domestic partner benefits are offered for same-sex couples.

the page goes on to brag about their high score on the human rights campaign corporate equality index and notes the firm's support for the ACLU's LGBT and AIDS projects, the lambda legal's civil rights celebration, the stonewall bar association and that the firm is a sponsor of atlanta's gay film festival.

i'm not mentioning any of this to say anything bad about the firm. on the contrary, i approve of all of those things. this is yet another indication of how anti-gay forces are slowly and steadily losing the culture war. it wasn't that long ago that a respectable corporate law firm wouldn't touch a gay issue with a ten foot pole. the fact that one of the top 20 firms in the u.s. "preferred by corporate general counsel to represent their companies on national matters." doesn't just mention it's commitment to LGBT equality but seems to use it as a selling point, shows what a hard road proponents of DOMA have ahead of them.

king & spalding's stance isn't even that unusual anymore. in fact, the firm is still thought of as a respectable corporate firm, and not as some radical firm with a "gay agenda." which is why it probably never occurred to john boehner that the firm would balk at the case when he hired them.

that's it! you people have stood in my way long enough. i'm going to clown college!

somewhere in the archives i mention that it always bugs me when the posts on the left becomes shorter than the links on the right. when that happens it creates this empty blue space that mocks me, nagging that i haven't been posting enough. i try my best to ignore it, but it does get to me.

and now the gap is back and it's one of the biggest i've ever seen. as i write this (i.e. before i hit "publish" for this post, pushing the left content down a little further), the post side doesn't even reach any lower than the end of my "liberal coalition" blogroll. it's not that i haven't been posting at all. it's that my posts haven't been long winded enough, or i haven't thrown in enough other shit like youtube videos or pictures.

until we reach a new equilibrium, don't be surprised if i start tossing up a bunch of useless filler, just to get the blog to stop laughing at me. or maybe it's time to trim the blogroll again.

unfriendly skies list

kazakhstan makes foreign policy magazine's "least safe places to fly" list, the only country in the notoriously dangerous-to-fly former soviet union to make the cut!

it's a bit strange how much they bust on kazakhstan air since that airline no longer exists. kaz air was replaced by air astana (KZ's current national carrier) which happens to be the one kazakhstani airline that isn't on the EU's blacklist. air astana is actually nicer than most u.s. carriers. i took it for two domestic flights, plus my trip to dubai. the planes were quite modern and it had the feel of a european carrier.

it's the smaller airlines that mostly operate regional flights and flights to other former soviet republics that are so scary. i mentioned scat airlines here. it was the only airline that flew to taraz, our home for most of 2010. if the airline had a frequent flier program, we'd surely have a free scat ticket by now.

messing with the congressional record

why do we still let members of congress amend the congressional record? presumably the practice dates from when an actual transcript was hard to do. under those circumstances it would make sense to let senators and representatives check and correct the statements attributed to them, especially since they often speak from prepared remarks.

but these days accurate transcription is easy. allowing members of congress to "correct" the record no longer serves to make the record more accurate, it invites alteration for political reasons which makes the congressional record less accurate. it's time for this historical anachronism to go.

it's not working

poor donald.

high end fast food

as i've been saying to mrs. noz lately, the newest fad seems to be high-end fast food. it's not just burgers either. think chipotle and qdoba as opposed to taco bell. high-end fast food ends up being about twice as expensive as "real" fast food, boast better food and all kinds of health and environmentalist pretensions.

haunted

it really is remarkable how much more often the onion makes substantive points compared with serious news sources.

look over there, a trump!

LID + 4 (الصيني)

 في الحقيقة، لا نعرف ماذا سنفعل مع هذا في هذا الوقت

not looking for adults

i think this means that mitch daniels is no longer a viable GOP presidential candidate.

all republicans are not anti-arab. but there are enough vehemently anti-arab republicans to effectively sink any nomination during the primary process.

trump

personally, i'm in the camp that believes that trump's presidential campaign is just one big publicity stunt. but if it isn't, i think it's pretty freaking awesome that he is leading the pack of GOP presidential nominees.

why is this year different from all other years of the, um, years?

i'm booked solid for the next few days. maybe i'll find the time to post, but in case i don't here's a penguin getting tickled to keep you occupied:

the mystery of coffee

i can't figure out how coffee as a drink was ever invented. i guess i could read a book or something, and maybe i will! but until i do, it just doesn't make sense.

look at it from the perspective of our theoretical pre-coffee people: they find these berries in ethiopia. the berries taste horrible though animals eat them. you would think they would have given up at that and just used the berries to feed their animals. there's no sense in trying to find a way for people to eat or drink the stuff right?

but no, instead someone decided to try drying out the berries to see if that will make them better. so now they had what we now call coffee beans. except they still taste horrible. so the experiment failed. no big deal, i guess those berries turned out to be a dead end, right?

no, instead someone decided to take those dried out beans and to try to roast them, which gets them a bunch of black burned beans. the burnt beans smell kinda good, but they still taste pretty bad. maybe they would just work as a potpourri? certainly there's no sense in continuing to look for ways to consume them, right?

undaunted, someone then tried to ground up the burnt beans. they still smell good! and still taste bad! time to finally give this long failure a rest, right?

nope. instead someone tried infusing the ground up burnt beans with hot water. and that person got us to coffee.

those are the minimum number of steps it would take. presumably the people of the pre-coffee world would not have guessed just right and would have tried a bunch of other things along the way before they got to actual coffee. so in addition to all the above steps there were probably a whole bunch of additional steps of things that didn't work out (maybe they tried to soak the roasted beans in animal fat, or buried the berries). that's a whole lot of false starts, each leaving them with little to show for it, before they finally ended up with something good.

what i don't understand is why they kept trying. what made them think that these particular berries would ever amount to anything? or did people try all those steps on everything? did someone, at some point, try drying, roasting crushing and infusing hot water through blueberries?

will there ever be a shanyrak?

i must admit the first thing i thought of when i read this was this.

still, i guess i should see it. i assume eventually they will release it with english subtitles. that's what you gotta do if you want to get it into the film festival circuit.

looks like i picked the wrong day to start sniffing maureen dowd

i have been skipping her columns for years, so why oh why did i take a peek at it today, just after spending the night in the pediatrics ward with noz jr?

hiding my ass like those bygone days of yesteryear

it's funny to have to use the tricks i learned to use to evade government censorship while i was in kazakhstan, but this time only one mile from my house. why does everyone like to block blogspot sites?

at-at for america

yesterday atrios wrote:

I've commented on this before (as with most things), but I continue to be amazed at the completely pervasive can't do spirit that seems to have gripped the country. Maybe we need to win a hockey game against the Soviets or something to bounce back.

the solution.

billboards of kazakhstan

i clicked on a link to this article and was surprised to see a photo that i took accompanying the article. technically, the article is violating the terms of my creative commons license (the license which requires attribution of the photo to me, but the photo credit on the article just says "Photo Credit: Flickr"), but i don't actually mind that much.

the post poached the image from my billboards of kazakhstan photoset. as i previously mentioned, after i took photos of everything you could take photos of in taraz, i became obsessed with the political/public service billboards scattered around town (and especially in the center where we lived). unlike historic sites, the billboards would change every few weeks, giving me an endless supply of stuff to photograph.

but now i'm home and i got all these photos of billboards that i can't read. so for a lack of better idea, i'm making a flickr photoset of them as part of my larger and extremely drawn out "upload every travel photo i have" project. i only have 11 billboards in the set so far, but there will be a lot more whenever i get around to uploading them. if anyone out there wants to translate them for me, feel free to leave the translation in the comments on the flickr page.

if anyone had the guts to tell him, that would have been really embarrassing

d'oh:

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev made eight grammatical and other mistakes while taking the presidential oath at his inauguration ceremony in Astana on April 8, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports.

Nazarbaev, 70, used incorrect conjunctive forms, incorrect case endings, and some words that sounded similar to the correct ones but have a different meaning. He also omitted the words "constitution" and "president" in just one sentence.

Nazarbaev was required to read aloud Chapter 42, Article 1, of the Kazakh Constitution, which states: "I solemnly swear to serve the people of Kazakhstan, to strictly follow the constitution and all other laws of Kazkahstan, to guarantee that citizens' rights and freedoms are respected, to fairly carry out all the duties I am obliged to fulfill as the president of the Republic of Kazakhstan."

According to the Kazakh Constitution, presidential candidates must be fluent in Kazakh. As a presidential candidate, Nazarbaev was required in February to take the state linguistic commission's Kazakh-language test.

previously: potential challengers to president nazarbayev excluded after failing kazakh language test.

things i learned today

(1) the free engraving cannot be in arabic characters. i guess that's what they mean by "just about anything."

(2) someone translated the most annoying monty python song into arabic.

just don't try to get the translated lyrics engraved onto an ipad.

the shutdown that wasn't

yay, the government didn't shut down!!!

boo, they avoided a shutdown by making a really bad deal. part of me wants to yell about the latest example of how president obama is such a terrible negotiator. but in the end i think yglesias is right on this one.

in any case, not having a shutdown is still good. and now i can get my tax refund! except that apparently i already got my refund a week ago. i just didn't notice that a U.S. treasury wire transfer had happened until i checked my account balance yesterday. in these direct deposit days, i guess i need to pay more attention.

hilary dowdy's favorite cultural tid-bits in kazakhstan

via kzblog i found a list of hilary dowdy's favorite cultural tid-bits in kazakhstan. hilary is a peace corps volunteer, currently in karaganda, so her experience is probably a little different than our kazakhstan year. i only really recognized about half of the tid-bits she mentions. but of those that i did recognize, her observations are spot-on, particularly:

inconvenience (#2)
nothing is what it seems (#6)
billboards (#7) (i mentioned my billboard obsession here)
national dish (#8)
say "hi" (#11)
packets (#13)
straws (#14)
star babies (#15)
superstitions (#16) (though i can't say i heard most of the ones on hilary's list)
ringtones (#17)
dangerous playground equipment (#20)
public music (#21)
outages (#22)
bad english (#26) (she mentions barf! previously: 1, 2, 3)
schedules (#27)
slow internet (#28)
lines (#29)
making change (#31) (related)
menu issues (#39)
stray animals (#40) (pooches!)
tea and cognac (#42) (see, also)
tardiness (#43)
no voicemail (#46) (as i mentioned)
spitting (#49)

some of these things are not just particular to kazakhstan; i've encountered versions of them in other parts of the developing world. but the "nothing is what it seems" thing is pure kazakhstan.

assad's attempt to save his ass

don't get me wrong, this is really good news for syrian kurds. i just think it's funny that assad is granting them "syrian arab nationality." i guess the world's last baathist regime just can't contemplate a multi-ethnic country.

news organizations can now get back to cutting their overseas bureaus

there was a brief moment when international news seemed to dominate american news sources. the protests in the arab world, the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear catastrophe in japan and a shiny new war in libya all seemed to push washington news off the front page, at least for a little while.

that seems to be mostly over now. the american media has turned back to its usual navel gazing (D.C. being america's navel)

three important differences between a government shutdown this year and the government shutdowns of 1995-96

(a) the government is more online, which raises a lot of new questions about which online resources are critical (and thus would not be shut down) and also makes the shutdown itself more expensive.

(b) the economy is still recovering from the great recession. a shutdown will definitely hurt the economy, though no one is sure by how much. that's quite different from the last shutdown, which came during the high-growth mid-90s.

(c) the u.s. is involved in 2-3 wars. in the last shutdown the u.s. had military commitments abroad, most notably in the balkans. but its current military commitments in iraq and afghanistan are much more substantial. which means that soldiers not getting paid is going to be a bigger deal this time.

although i basically think that a shutdown would ultimately benefit the democrats this time like it did last time, it's no sure thing that a shutdown this year will play out politically the same way the last one did in 1996.

ADDING: there are also a bunch of other less important but still might be significant differences between a 2011 shutdowns and the 1995-96 shutdowns related to the fact that the two shutdowns in the 1990s took place between november and january whereas the current shutdown, if it happens, will start in early-to-mid-april. that means that people applying for passports for summer vacations are going to be worried about getting their passports issued before their departure dates, people expecting tax refunds will worry about waiting longer to get their money and people planning trips to national parks will have to suspend their plans until this gets worked out.

bold prediction

i predict there will either be a government shut down or a last minute budget deal.

apparently i'm not the only one obsessed with kazakhstan

in D.C., one of the words that comes up most often in online dating profiles is "kazakhstan".

i'm guessing the word comes from the part of the profile where the participant states where he/she is from and not what he/she is looking for. because kazakhstan isn't all that hard to find. it's pretty big.

thinking ahead on prosser-kloppenberg

the wisconsin supreme court election from yesterday is still too close to call. as i write this kloppenberg has a slight lead of 140 votes (out of about 1.5 million cast) with 3620 of the 3630 precincts reporting. as i look over the list for the ten missing precincts, it looks like they are: two precincts in crawford county, one in dane, two in dunn, one in jefferson, one in juneau, two in milwaukee, and one in taylor. all but jefferson and taylor are counties that have favored kloppenberg in the precincts that are already counted. (dane county, where madison is, and milwaukee county are both the largest population centers and pretty strongly in the kloppenberg camp)

so i would guess that kloppenberg will keep her lead. maybe it will grow a little, but it's going to be really close. i expect there will be a contentious recount and possibly a court challenge.

if there is a court challenge, there's an issue of how it would work if the case is appealed to the state supreme court. the prosser-kloppenberg race is over the swing seat on the state supreme court. currently the court is divided 4-3 favoring the conservatives, but prosser, one of those conservatives, is the one up for reelection in this race. so even if he is still on the court when the appeal is heard, he would have to be excluded from the case. that would leave a court divided 3-3, assuming the justices vote along partisan lines (as justices often do in these highly partisan fights).

on the federal level when the supreme court is divided evenly on a decision, there is no decision of the supreme court. instead the decision from the court below stands without a supreme court opinion. assuming they follow the same rule in wisconsin, whatever panel they get from the wisconsin court of appeals would essentially decide the case.

UPDATE: all precincts reporting has kloppenberg ahead by 204 votes. next up, the recount and then maybe the court challenge.

obama's options for the trial of detainees

plenty of people are blasting the obama administration for announcing that they will try khalid sheikh mohammed in a tribunal in guantanamo rather than in a civilian court. but the obama administration didn't really have a choice on this one. congress blocked funding of any civilian trials. the administration was faced with three choices:

(a) let KSM go;

(b) wait to see whether congress ever changes its mind and passes a law that would permit the funding of civilian trials; or

(c) try KSM at guantanamo.

i'm not so sure they didn't make the wrong choice. KSM should face a trial. there is evidence that he planned some pretty horrific attacks. congress is unlikely to change its mind any time soon and its highly unlikely they would permit funding before obama leaves office, so (b) is effectively indefinite detention without trial. that leaves (c).

if you read eric holder's announcement of the gitmo trial it's pretty clear that was his reasoning.

In November 2009, I announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other individuals would stand trial in federal court for their roles in the terrorist attacks on our country on September 11, 2001.
...

After consulting with prosecutors from both the Department of Justice and Department of Defense and after thoroughly studying the case, it became clear to me that the best venue for prosecution was in federal court.   I stand by that decision today.

...

Unfortunately, since I made that decision, Members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantanamo detainees to trial in the United States, regardless of the venue.   As the President has said, those unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counter terrorism efforts and could harm our national security.   Decisions about who, where and how to prosecute have always been – and must remain – the responsibility of the executive branch.   Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence and other information necessary to make prosecution judgments.   Yet they have taken one of the nation’s most tested counter terrorism tools off the table and tied our hands in a way that could have serious ramifications.   We will continue to seek to repeal those restrictions.

 

But we must face a simple truth:   those restrictions are unlikely to be repealed in the immediate future.   And we simply cannot allow a trial to be delayed any longer for the victims of the 9/11 attacks or for their family members who have waited for nearly a decade for justice.   I have talked to these family members on many occasions over the last two years.   Like many Americans, they differ on where the 9/11 conspirators should be prosecuted, but there is one thing on which they all agree:   We must bring the conspirators to justice.

so to all those who slam the obama administration for yesterday's announcement, i ask them: what should obama and holder have done instead?

here is what i think they should do: create a tribunal with the same rights as any u.s. civilian court. just because congress has blocked them from transferring detainees to the mainland and holding a civilian trial in federal court, why can't the obama administration effectively create a mirror image of the civilian courts in guantanamo? george bush asserted that the executive branch has the right to create a military tribunal with whatever civil rights he saw fit. why can't obama use that very same executive authority to create a "military commission" presided over by retired federal judges, applying regular u.s. law and extending to them all the same rights that a criminal defendant would have in federal court?

the only one that i don't think they could pull off is the right to a jury trial, because there isn't a legitimate looking  jury pool on the military base. but they could give KSM and other defendants a bench trial. just because it's in guantanamo doesn't mean it has to be a kangaroo court.

obamicare for seniors

atrios writes what had been bounced around in my head in the past 24 hours. paul ryan's "courageous" proposal to abolish medicare has a lot of superficial resemblance to the affordable care act (aka obamacare).

rather than being a "government takeover of health care", obama's health care reform essentially requires everyone under the age of 65 to participate in the private insurance market with subsidies to those who might have difficulty affording insurance on their own. similarly, ryan's plan for medicare would phase out the existing single payer system for people over 65 and force them to purchase their own private insurance policy. only instead of giving assistance just to those who might have trouble affording health insurance, ryan's plan would give government subsidies (in the form of vouchers) to everyone over 65.

i realize it is useless to hope for logical consistency from the right these days. but their embrace of the ryan plan for medicare while simultaneously claiming that "obamacare" is a disaster for this country makes no sense at all.

who knows?

we will probably never know for sure, but there is a possibility at least that this is just an attempt by western intelligence agencies to divide the qadhafi family.

goldstone fallout

the israeli government's reaction to the partial retraction of the goldstone report by judge goldstone is a little puzzling.

when goldstone was first commissioned to investigate possible war crimes in the gaza war, he asked both hamas and israel to cooperate with the investigation. hamas (mostly) cooperated, but israel refused. as a result most of what goldstone got was only from one side got of the story, so he issued a report using the best information he had, concluded that both sides probably committed war crimes and ended by advising both sides to launch their own investigation.

then the israeli political establishment lost their fucking minds. after refusing to present their side of the story they were outraged that goldstone had not considered their side of the story. so they loudly denounced the report, rejecting goldstone's conclusion that they had anything to investigate, and then the IDF went ahead and did those investigations that he asked for anyway.

so now years later goldstone has the benefits of those investigations and is using that further information, information that the israelis adamantly refused to provide him when he asked for it before, has decided that he would not have come to the same conclusions in his report if he knew then what he knows now.

somehow the israelis are viewing goldstone's new statements as evidence that they were right all along. actually what it shows is that they were acting like a bunch of idiotic buffoons: that goldstone was never an anti-israeli zealot that they kept trying to paint him as, and that the whole reason that his report ended up being so critical of them is because they stupidly wouldn't cooperate. the horrible "damage to israel's reputation" that they claimed the goldstone report inflicted upon israel was actually completely self-inflicted.

so now the israelis are going further and demanding that the UN retract the entire goldstone report. except that goldstone didn't retract the entire report, just some of the allegations.¹ it seems like they've totally missed the point of all of this, which is that refusing to cooperate with the investigation was dumb and counterproductive.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
1-plus there's an argument (quite a strong one in my mind) that a military's investigation of its own behavior is not actually all that reliable. so just because goldstone is satisfied with the IDF's investigations doesn't mean that everyone else has to be.

kazakh election day

is today. but they are 9-10 hours ahead of us (KZ has two time zones), so it's already over. early reports suggest a high turnout (and also government officials paying off and/or coercing people to vote) which means that the boycott failed.

but the best part (via KZblog) is the mels yeleusizov, one of the three candidates running against the incumbant president nursultan nazarbayev. mr. yeleusizov told the moscow times that he voted for president nazarbayev.

that pretty much says it all.

ADDING: official turnout stats and exit polling data is in this post. the official preliminary results will be announced before noon eastern kaz time which means the middle of the night for us united statesians. not that there's any reason to stay up for the results. we all know where this is going.

cords

i took noz jr. into philly today. we made a stop at my office and he turned out to be fascinated by the twisty cord that connects the headset to the base. it occurred to me that jr. had never seen a corded phone before.

we have a fairly new phone system in our office, but the phones all have cords. i don't think i've ever seen a cordless office phone and yet it's been more than a decade since cords disappeared from people's homes. why aren't office phones cordless?

breaking: president nazarbayev thinks kazakhstan is awesome under his rule

i'm not sure what the point of this kind of piece is. the longtime president of kazakhstan expresses his opinion that kazakhstan is doing great with him in charge.

i guess i know why president nazarbayev would want his musings published in a major american newspaper just a few days before the polls open for his (all but inevitable) reelection. i'm just not sure why any major newspaper would want to publish it.