Crumbling Camden

So, as some of you may or may not know, Sunny Camden, NJ is currently trying to redevelop itself. While this is a wonderful idea and much needed it is not very simple and the people in charge of it continue to make things worse instead of better.

They are trying so hard to get businesses into the city (which is necessary) that they are giving incredible tax breaks and abatements for businesses that they cannot afford to do the same for residents. They are trying to redevelop a large residential area of the city, giving new houses to residents who already live there. However, they aren't given a property tax break to those who stay, so they will soon be taxed out of the area.

Recently, they also started condemning properties to do building and promising to reimburse owners. Not only are they condemning unprofitable businesses, but also some of the few profitable businesses in the city, and are apparently having trouble doing the actual work or reimbursing or assisting those businesses that have to relocate.

I am all for redevelopment, but not at the expense of people who already live and do business in the city.

Terror and US Foreign Policy

Thank you to Geoff over at American Entropy for this one. He gives a good intro, so I will just link the Q&A with Michael Scheuer from Harper's.

It is always an argument I get into with my more conservative friends; whether US Foreign policy, especially in the middle east, only increases support for terrorist organizations. Here is a pretty conservative CIA guy saying it does.

Sorry!

I have been in the process of moving and trying to get internet so have not been able to post. I hope to be back up fairly regularly soon, but I am back at Law School and might not have as much time. So keep checking back and see what I got.

-PV

I cannot believe I am quoting Ann Coulter!

But I am. It is her column from last week. I am a little behind, but it takes me a few days to build up the joy and happiness I need to have so that when I read Ann Coulter I don't do something very bad. But last week, she actually said something I agree with:

"When you vote Democratic, you're saying NO to mindless patriotism. "

Now she says that as it is a bad thing. She thinks we should be mindlessly patriotic, which scares me. I would like to remind her what mindless patriotism gave us: Nazi Germany, WWII Era Japan, the USSR, and North Korea to name a few. Mindless patriotism is what most often puts dictators in power.

So please, whether you vote Democrat, Republican, Green, Working Families, or Right to Life; Say NO to mindless patriotism!

Posner Weighs in

Judge Posner has a lot to say about counter-terrorism methods in the US. For those of you who don't know, Judge Posner is a sitting judge on the 7th Circuit United States Court of Appeals.

Basically Judge Posner is recommending that the US create a counter-terrorism unit similar to Britain's MI-5. Because MI-5's main responsibility is counter-terrorism, not crime prevention, and they can hold a suspect for 28 days w/o a judicial hearing, Judge Posner believes they are more effective against terrorism. The FBI can hold a suspect for more than 48 hours, but only in extraordinary circumstances.

While I do not agree with everything Judge Posner says, the idea of allowing authorities to hold a terror suspect for an extended period of time may have some merit (I can just see the entire left side of the political spectrum calling for me head right now). I do not mean indefinitely, but a period of time similar to Britain. Again, this would ONLY be for terrorist activity, activity that is very hard to prove unless something has actually happened, hence the difficulty under our legal system. I would also want to include some heavy civil sanctions against the detaining agency for wrongful detainment. We do not want the federal government picking up Muslims off the street just to try and pump them for information when the Feds have no reason to believe they are involved in terrorism. Stiff civil penalties would help alleviate the chances of this happening (though admittedly, not eliminate). However, as most people know, theory and practice are two different things. While in theory it may not be so bad, I would be fearful that we would start having people disappear into black vans on the street. The authorization to do this would have to be clear and unambiguous with significant monitoring and oversight. While I am not saying we should start doing this tomorrow to prevent terrorism, it is something we might want to have serious conversation between the opposing sides beyond, "You are wrong, we are right."

As I mentioned above, there are a lot of things I don't agree with Judge Posner on. One in particular is the end of his column where he appears to be saying that we should presume Muslim Americans are intent on attacking us until proven otherwise. That is a scary thing to imply. Maybe it is just me, but thoughts like that lead to things like the Japanese Internment camps and what happened in The Siege. Yes we need to balance civil liberties and protection from terrorism, but as soon as we start making people think all Muslims are terrorist we start breeding mistrust and hate which in turn would create more terrorists.

Dell Recall

Heads up to all you Dell laptop owners, they are recalling a large number of their laptops due to a problem with their batteries catching on fire.

Check out Dellbatteryprogram.com for details on the recall. I would like to point out that while this is appearing all over the internet news, Dell only has a small little 8-point font link to "battery recall" at Dell.com.

Private Police Force?

Wow.

That is just about all I have to say to that.

My favorite line from it is under "The Uncooperatives" link:

"If we receive any resident opposition, we will prosecute them for interference in a legal proceeding. There are always dissidents who feel they are beyond the law. "

Apparently there are. I bet ICE is not so happy that these guys are listing them under "Supporting Websites." I really have to remember to follow these guys and see what happens.

Here is what The Californian had to say about it.

The Post "Almost Terror Attack" TSA Rules

So apparently people are starting to adjust to the no liquids rule on planes. Yes, this is a little annoying, but my brother, who flew today made a point that I think was very valid: This ban on liquids is the best thing that has happened to air travel in a while. People are not bringing on these huge carryon bags that holding up security checks and delay boarding of the plane. In his experience today, the trip through security was quicker than it has ever been and so was boarding and deparking the plane. Maybe in the end, this ban will be good for air travel. I mean to we honestly have to carry our entire bathroom and kitchen with us on the plane?

About the only thing I would be upset about not being able to carry on is my water bottle. I don't know if they are allowing people to bring an empty water bottle through security and then fill it up after.

World War III?

Well when you put it that way:

Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single
emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.

The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.

This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation.

The World seems down right scary!

White House Drafts War Crimes Act Amendment

History

The Bush Administration continues its push to limit criminal prosecution of Americans who violate the Geneva Convention. There is something very wrong with the idea of, "We did something wrong. Let’s change the law so we don't get in trouble." It is scary that they think they can just change laws that get in their way. They are not even considering the fact that the War Crimes Act also creates a criminal offense when a foreigner violates the Geneva Convention on an American Citizen.

Former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo similarly said that U.S. soldiers and agents should "not be beholden to the definition of vague words by international or foreign courts, who often pursue nakedly political agendas at odds with the United States."

This is not about foreign courts, this is about American courts. An American statute cannot create a cause of action in an international or foreign court. It is outside our jurisdiction. The federal government would need to prosecute a case under this law. It would be tried in our courts, by our prosecutors, not by foreigners. It would need to be and egregious violation of the Geneva Convention for our government to prosecute under this law (hence the fact that no one has been). If anything, this does more to allow for prosecution of foreigners violating the Geneva Convention than for us violating it.

All this will do is make us look worse in the eyes of the world. Why should we care? We are the New York Yankees of the World. We are big, we are powerful, we win, and we throw our money around. If we continue to pretend like international conventions we helped write and agreed to do not completely apply to us, we will continue to undermine our foreign policy objects and further alienate our allies and harm our relations even further with nations that already see us as the great Satan.

While some are destroying things in the Middle East...

...Some are building. Leave it to those wacky guys in Dubai to use their other resources, sand and rock, to build beautiful designer islands. I will take one in the New York Ranger's Statute of Liberty emblem if you please and do not forget my mountains. I need my skiing and mountain biking.

If they don't get you one way...

...they will get you another.

Taxes. We hate 'em. Government needs them. If they do not get us with income taxes, they will get us with property taxes. I think what people fail to understand is that we need to pay for government. Those great Bush Tax cuts greatly benefited business and the higher income brackets, but as a result, there was less money to be given back to states and therefore states (also because of a slow in economic growth) had less money to give to local governments. So to make up the shortfall, local governments had to increase property taxes or fees. I know of someone who was all happy with their 300 dollar federal tax rebate from the tax cuts. He was not so happy when he got slapped with a $150 busing fee for his kids and an increase in his property taxes to make up the shortfall in the school budget that more than made up for his federal rebate.

Tax cuts can be great, but if they are not accompanied by intelligent cuts in spending, the deficit will increase and other taxes will increase. So Bush looks popular for cutting taxes while local governments take the heat because they need to increase local taxes partially because of the Bush Tax cut.

Globalize Me

First off, I just have to say, I took the Delta Shuttle between Washington and New York this weekend and it was wonderful. I got to relax in comfortable terminal while sipping free coffee and reading my free Washington Post before getting on a 50 minute flight where I was actually fed. Had I had my laptop with me I would have been online for free and writing about the experience right then and there. It was such a great flying experience, I would do it everyday if it weren't so incredibly impractical, expensive, and environmentally bad.

Anyway, I was sharing this story of the joy of the Delta Shuttle and discussing Globalization, specifically The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, with some friends and I heard a great story about what our world is coming to:

Wife was flying to visit some family and the weather was horrible. Flights
have been delayed and cancelled all day, but so far her flight is fine.
She is sitting in the airport talking to Husband on the cell phone.
Husband decides to check the status of Wife's flight. To both of their
surprise, the airline's website shows the flight as cancelled. Husband
tells Wife to get up to the counter and get on a new flight before they announce
the cancellation in the airport (which they haven't done yet). Still on
the phone, Wife goes up to the counter while Husband checks flights
online. Wife asks at counter if there are any seats on the next flight and
is told "No." Meanwhile, it has been announced that the flight is
cancelled and there is now a huge line behind Wife at the counter. Husband
says to her, "Ask them about seat 9B." So Wife says to employee, "I
understand seat 9B is available." The employee remarks, "My, you are
correct, I don't know how I missed that. Let me get you on that
flight." Husband watches online as seat 9B disappears from the list of
available seats online.

I was amazed when I heard that story. I am not so surprised that it can be done, but that it was done. It is one of those things I need to keep in my bag of tricks. The world truly is getting "flat." Anyone, anywhere can find out almost anything they want and use it to help themselves or others. Three cheers for the internet, cell phones, and airline employees who know when they are beaten.

Goodbye Freedom Fries!

Well, the House of Representatives has gone back to good ol' French Fries at the lunch counter. I still cannot believe there ever was a switch. Talk about an immature way to lash out at someone who does not agree with our policies. The fact that Congressmen spent their time getting the name changed makes me feel almost as good about the priorities of our Congress as it spending an entire day discussing a non-binding resolution.

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lately I have felt the need to go back and read this great speech by one of our greatest Presidents. It is short, simple, and powerful (Three qualities it seems most of today's speech writers don't possess).

In a time when the country seems so divided, we must remember where we came from and what we have been through. We have the extreme right cursing the left and the extreme left doing the same thing back. We have rumors of the dissolution of the United States and creation of a North American Union through the Security and Prosperity Partnership (which seem to have died off some since the Commerce Department responded to Corsi's FOIA request). We get some conservatives saying liberals in office hate America and should be removed from office while some liberals say Bush is a terrorist.

Yes we are divided. The country does not agree on what to do about Iraq or Israel/Lebanon, or even social security and stem cell research. But we are not nearly as divided as we once were. Sure some of us may get into verbal sparing matches or dismiss the other side because they don't agree with us; there are those who still stand for a lot of the same things while understanding that neither side is ever going to get exactly what they want. This is precisely because we are a democracy and democracy is about working together. Those who respond to the opposition by attacking their character and instigating confrontations are the one who hate America because they only like the American system when things go their way and curse it when they don't.

So remember what we are capable of doing to each other when we get heated over political disagreements. We must always remember that there is more that unites us than divides us.

Biden for President?

I guess there are worse reasons to run for President than Joe Biden apparently has.

Some Common Sense

If you are going to steal and ID to try to pass as 21, be sure not to hand that ID to the waitress you stole it from.

Friendly Reminder

This is a friendly reminder from the Bush Administration: Mission Accomplished.

Further in the financial hole...

It is no surprise that the costs of reconstruction in Iraq are turning out to be more than anticipated. Though apparently things are worse than they even appeared! According to an independent auditor that reports to Congress, the people in charge of reconstruction have been cooking the books. They have been reporting that projects are within the budget while classifying any overrun as "indirect costs" which aren't fully reported to Congress. One of my favorite lines is:

The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.

The project was actually reported as being on time when it was close to 300 days behind schedule. And the Bush Administration claims it is the liberal media that only reports the bad news.

Krugman: Reign of Error

This was so good, I had to reprint the entire thing:

July 28, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist Reign of Error By PAUL KRUGMAN

The New York Times

Amid everything else that's going wrong in the world, here's one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.

At one level, this shouldn't be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don't like have been established, whether it's the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.

But it's dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.

Here's how the process works.

First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue -- stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq -- officials refuse to acknowledge the facts.

Sometimes the officials simply lie. "The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,"Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave.

Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice's response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, -- as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.-- (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it's still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) "But," she went on, "that's a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11

Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It's hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.

Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980's-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)

Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.

And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren't de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?

The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it's not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the "good news" from Iraq -- and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration's favor.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn't let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that's not at all what happened, I've missed them.

It's all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past," -- he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?