Monthly Archives: May 2007

Friday Ark #138

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Invertebrate Blogging Pet Blogging Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

Visit all the boarders, Link to the Ark and check back for updates through Sunday afternoon!

You can find out how to board the Friday Ark at the Arkive page.

Cats

Dogs

Other Vertebrates

Birds

Invertebrates

In Memoriam

Didn’t Make It

  • x

Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)

  • x

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map.

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings. Also, there are more doggies at Weekend Dog Blogging hosted this weekend by Sweetnicks.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 163rd edition , 5/7, is up at When Cats Attack. The 163rd edition will be hosted on 5/13 by, well, Laurence hasn’t said yet . There are more weekly cats at Weekend Cat Blogging #101 hosted on 5/12-13 by What Did You Eat? . Do go shout out at The Catbloggers Frappr Map.

Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. The 48th edition is up and hosted by Greg Laden. The 49th edition will be hosted on 5/17 by Via Negativa.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The 19th edition is up and hosted by Burning Silo. The 20th edition will be hosted the evening of May 6th by milkriverblog.

For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page, The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival

Note for Haloscan Users:

Over the past month or so Haloscan started (the end of July) handling of trackbacks has improved though it is still pretty broken for carnival type posts. Now, instead of rejecting every attempt to ping it accepts single pings for a while and then will start rejecting them. I will keep trying to track back to Haloscan boarders but can make no guarantees for any particular week.

Note for Typepad Users:

Typepad continues to behave similar to Haloscan for trackbacks. I been able to get trackbacks to most, if not all, Typepad based boarders. I have to do it one at a time and wait a while in between pings but Typepad does not go into semi-permanent rejection mode like Haloscan.

This is Wiretapping?

This entry was posted in Government Privacy on by

We should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when we are in a private place. Say our home, in our car with the windows closed, etc.
There is no way, though, that police should ever have any expectation of privacy while performing duties on behalf of their public employers. It is pretty ludicrous that in one jurisdiction police have charged someone with wiretapping when he recorded them while being investigated for drunk driving:

Police say they were patrolling the downtown area at 2:54 a.m. when they discovered Christopher A. Power of 52 Chestnut St. sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle with its motor running at the Rochester Common.
After speaking with Power, police began investigating him for driving while intoxicated and arrested him. During the arrest an audio recording device was discovered.
“During a search after the arrest an audio recorder was discovered on the driver’s seat cushion,” Capt. Paul Callaghan said. “The officer noticed that the recorder was recording.”
Power was charged with driving while intoxicated and wiretapping, which is a Class B felony.

Perhaps they were doing their investigation via cell phone. Or perhaps they live in an alternate universe where wiretapping means something very different.
That aside, police must always expect to be audio- or videotaped when they are on duty.

Via Balko.

Were the Kent State Shootings Murder?

This entry was posted in Government US History US Politics on by

Recently released audio tapes suggest that the 4 Dead In Ohio were murdered 37 years ago:

The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder.
….
For 37 years the official cover story has been that a mysterious shot rang out and the young Guardsmen panicked, firing directly into the “mob” of students.
This week, that cover story was definitively proven to be a lie.
Prior to the shooting, a student named Terry Strubbe put a microphone at the window of his dorm, which overlooked the rally. According to the Associated Press, the 20-second tape is filled with “screaming anti-war protectors followed by the sound of gunfire.”
But in an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is also heard shouting “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!”
The sound of gunshots follow the word “Point.”

If true this is not a big surprise. I doubt that there are many who were active at the time who accepted that it was anything other than government sanctioned murder.

Yea, it was 37 years ago but this cold case deserves a rehearing and any perps who are still available should be nailed. Including any of the folks that were pulling their triggers!

Via The Distributed Republic.

What, tenet Should Have Resigned?

This entry was posted in bush bush administration Federal Government Iraq on by

Nora Ephron is right that we set our expectations too high if we expect government officials to resign as a matter of principle:

The notion that George Tenet — or Colin Powell, to take another example of a person we keep asking this question about — would have resigned just because he knew that the administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction, is truly laughable. …
…
We have such affection for the idea that people will quit on a matter of principle that it’s almost sweet. We believe that they quit for moral reasons, that they quit because they want to take a stand against impropriety, that they quit, willingly quit, because they know right from wrong. Once again, let me say this: no one quits.

This administration doesn’t even fire people until the last ounce of incompetence is wrung out of them.*
Unfortunately she becomes an apologist for the bush war when she says:

And in fairness to Tenet and Powell, what’s clear now wasn’t so clear back in the day. That image of the two of them at the United Nations is today such an indelible marker on the road to war. But they couldn’t have known at that time that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq;

Sure, the full scope of the bush administration’s incompetence was not yet obvious but, yes, they should have known the sparkler bit. That was tenet’s job….
More importantly even if they had found sparklers that would not have provided a moral excuse for the invasion, for the wasted Iraqi and American lives.

*Given how many of the incompetents are left this is a truly depressing thought.