Torture

by Ted on October 15, 2004

The 9-11 Commission bill is going to conference, where Senators and Representatives will negotiate the differences between the two bills to come up with a final version to send to the White House. Katherine has a good post about the language re: outsourcing torture in the House bill.

We will have an opportunity to contact the members of conference committee to politely let our concerns be heard. Here they are; we’ll have more about this later.

House Democrats:

Robert Menendez (NJ)
Jane Harman (CA)
Ike Skelton (MO)

House Republicans:

David Drier (CA)
Pete Hoekstra (MI)
Henry Hyde (IL)
James Sensenbrenner (WI)
Duncan Hunter (CA)

Senate Democrats

Joe Lieberman (CT)

Carl Levin (MI)

Dick Durbin (IL)

Jay Rockefeller (WV)

Bob Graham (FL)
Frank Lautenberg (NJ)

Senate Republicans

Susan Collins (ME)
George Voinovich (OH)
Norm Coleman (MN)
John Sununu (NH)
Pat Roberts (KS)
Mike DeWine (OH)
Trent Lott (MS)

Dirty Politics as a Vocation

by Kieran Healy on October 15, 2004

“Read and learn”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/10/index.html#004459. The old “pig-fucker strategy”:http://www.methree.net/archives/December/grueterthompson1.html emerges for the last month of the campaign, with the added twist of getting the party operatives to plant fake evidence.

Evil Spyware problem

by Chris Bertram on October 15, 2004

I’m plagued by an evil SpyWare problem at the moment, which neither SpyBot S&D nor AdAware detects. (Norton AV also says I’m virus free.) The problem is an occasional launch of an Internet Explorer window, linking to this site or that site. Perhaps installing XP SP2 would solve this, but my last attempt just hung my system mid-install (and I needed to do a lot to recover). I’m tempted just to rename the IE exe file so that the program won’t run, but since evil Microsoft may have programmed in all kinds of subterranean connections between the browser and the OS, I’m wary of doing so. Any advice? (Advice of the form “You should buy a Mac” will not improve my immediate situation or mood.)

A tsunami of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism?

by Chris Bertram on October 15, 2004

The “pro-war British”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/15/does_she_exaggerate.php “blogs”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 seem to be linking to and discussing “an article”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15464 in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine which alleges that the UK is in the grip of a frightening epidemic of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In the words of one of their number, “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000842.html :

bq. This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain

I’m neither American nor a Jew, so I hesitate somewhat to downplay these reports. Certainly unthinking anti-Americanism — of the kind depicted in Whit Stillman’s film “Barcelona”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109219/ — is a feature of European political and social life. (Only the other day, a supermarket checkout assistant told me that “after all, Michael Moore is just another fat American”.) And anti-semitism also exists in a number of forms: there’s a residual British conservative strain of it and it has come to infect some of the discourse of anti-Israeli polemic on the Left. But American and Jewish friends and colleagues do not tell me of hostility of the kind recounted in the article, and the judicious Jonathan Edelstein reports in “comments to one of the blogs discussing the alleged phenomenon”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 :

bq. I’m a fairly frequent visitor to London and just returned from four days there, where I hung out with quite a few Guardian and Independent-readers, some of them avowedly Marxist. None of them had any problem with me as an American, a Jew or a Zionist – we had some lively arguments, certainly, but none of them degenerated to personal abuse, anti-semitism or “Israel is a pirate state” rhetoric. I’ve never encountered that kind of crap in the UK, although I’m sure it exists; there are idiots everywhere. The reception of Americans in London probably has a great deal to do with the particular people they meet.

I’d be interested to hear of other experiences.

The ultimate dotcom

by John Q on October 15, 2004

I’m five years too late, and McNeil PPC has beaten me to the name, but it struck me the other night[1] that iModium.com would have been the ideal name for an Internet/telecom/dotcom IPO in the late 1990s.

fn1. There was no medical reason for this thought, just a random neural connection