Dick Francis, after a six-year absence, has written a new book! His wife was his researcher and collaborator on the 38 books he’s previously written. “…after Mary’s death in 2000 Dick Francis announced he would write no more books.” But now: He met his publishers this week to see if they liked the manuscript for …
I’ve been wandering around legal blogs trying to get a grip on what today’s SCOTUS decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld means, and I find this conclusion one of the more interesting ones. The key to understanding Hamdan is that the Court did not tell the President that he could under no circumstances create military tribunals …
Today the Supreme Court said military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees are illegal, violating both US law and the Geneva Conventions. The case raised core constitutional principles of separation of powers as well as fundamental issues of individual rights. Specifically, the questions concerned: The power of Congress and the executive to strip the federal courts and …
Given today’s implicit approval by the Supreme Court of the redrawing of Congressional district lines in mid-decade, rather than shortly after the decennial census, will there be a spate of map-drawing every time a state legislature changes hands from one party to another? “Some people are predicting a rash of mid-decade redistricting. I am skeptical,” …
I finished Glenn Greenwald’s book, “How Would a Patriot Act?”. I didn’t learn anything new, but then I’m not the target audience. The audience is the non-blog-reading public. It’s a well-crafted and careful exposition of how the Bush Administration has deliberately broken constitutional law in various actions it’s taken, from the complete bypassing of the …
Hey! Good advice free! No highly-paid consultants named Shrum needed! “If you believe the Iraq war is a success, vote Republican. If you believe it is a failure, vote Democratic.” Is our side listening?
Here’s an example of the mindset of Bush’s Forest Service appointees: in an article describing a report detailing an increase in violence directed toward Forest Service employees, the guy in charge of the agency said …the group’s 2004 report unfairly manipulated Forest Service data to make a political point and that it was unfortunate the …
Found in the remainder bin (Alas!): “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”, by Al Franken (does anyone know whether he’s seriously considering running for Dayton’s seat in the Senate?). I got that when making a trip to Borders specifically to buy “Lapdogs”, Eric Boehlert’s book about the press’s disgraceful rollover in front of …
I just finished Suskind’s new book. (WaPo review; NYT review.) Neither the WaPo reviewer nor the NYT one gets what Suskind’s aiming at. Suskind is trying to make a larger point with this book, I think, than just to tell the story of what went on between CIA and the White House during 2001–2004. He …
More book purchases: Suskind’s “One Percent Doctrine”; Gordon and Trainor’s “Cobra II”; and Hopkirk’s “The Great Game”. The first two probably need no introduction; the third is the story of the low-level Russian-British conflict over the Caucasus and Southwest Asia in the late 19th century. Why am I interested in that? Probably because the Khyber …