Farris Hassan’s Day Off

This story is just odd:

The mother of a 16-year-old prep school student who journeyed to Iraq on a journalistic whim hasn’t decided how her son will be punished. She’s just relieved he’s on his way home. Farris Hassan left Baghdad Friday to begin traveling home, drawing to a close an adventure that could have cost him his life. The high school junior took the trip without telling his parents.

“When he first gets off the plane, I’m going to hug him,” said his mother, Shatha Atiya. “Then I’m going to collapse for a few hours and then we’re going to sit down for a long discussion about the consequences.”

Shehnaz Hassan, Farris Hassan’s sister, said as of Saturday morning that her brother was in Kuwait City and was scheduled for a return flight Monday, although they hoped to secure an earlier flight on Sunday. She said her mother spoke with her brother and a U.S. official over the phone. No further details were provided.

I was unaware minors could take international flights.

Pet Blogging

Some more commenters pets, and first up is one of the Jeff’s (I forget which Jeff, as we have five) pets:

Roxi (dog) and Felix have it out on the couch. I was promised no cats were hurt making that photo.

Cali (tortoise colored) and Felix (black) play in the sink.

Next up, from Katinula, our second cat named Cali:

Cali girl, relaxing underneath the Christmas Tree.

If you haven’t already, send your pics in. Please make sure you put your alias that you use to comment in your email.

Justice Is Funny

Amusing piece in the NY Times on the funniest SCOTUS justice.

The Investigation

By now you have all read this:

The Justice Department said on Friday that it had opened a criminal investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a secret National Security Agency program under which President Bush authorized eavesdropping on people in the United States without court warrants.

The investigation began in recent days after a formal referral from the security agency regarding the leak, federal officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the investigation.

The program, whose existence was revealed in an article in The New York Times on Dec. 16, has provoked sharp criticism from civil liberties groups, some members of Congress and some former intelligence officials who believe that it circumvents the law governing national security eavesdropping.

President Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales have vigorously defended the program as a legal, critical defense against terrorism that has helped prevent attacks in this country. They say Mr. Bush’s executive order authorizing the program is constitutional as part of his powers as commander in chief and under the resolution passed by Congress days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That resolution authorized the use of force against terrorists.

The White House said on Friday that it had played no role in the Justice Department’s decision. But in Crawford, Tex., where Mr. Bush has been all week, a spokesman was sent to talk to reporters with a prepared statement about the decision.

Does this mean the Justice Department has taken the position that the Bush wiretapping bit was legal? The ACLU has taken the position (and I am sure it will soon be echoed around the left wng of the blogosphere) that the leakers are heroes and whistleblowers. If they are in fact whistleblowers, how can an investigation go forward? It would seem to me the first thing that needs to be done is that Justice has to determine the law was or was not broken, then they can investigate.

And since I am asking so many damned questions, do lions and big game cats purr like domesticated cats?

*** Update ***

A GINORMOUS round-up of reactions to the investigation can be found here.

More Abramoff Fun

The WaPo reports that Tom DeLay, who recently denied Jack Abramoff three times to Sue Schmidt, basically worked as head prep cook in Abramoff’s high-volume kitchen of sleaze. Josh Marshall outlined this controversy before anybody else, combining insider sources and reporter’s intuition to define a massive clandestine network that basically operated as a money-laundering nexus and slush fund for the modern Republican party, and he has the best commentary on the latest scoop.

Threatening to ramp up this story from a slow burn into a full-fledged forest fire, rumors about Abramoff announcing a plea agreement have fixed on Tuesday as the likely announcement date.

As I’ve pointed out before, this story threatens to become the consuming scandal of 2006. Numerous informed sources have said that this could become the biggest criminal case against Congress since and possibly including Abscam. Fasten your seatbelts.

I Have Nothing To Say

It is a slow news day, I am unmotivated, and there is football on. Consider this an open thread. My apologies for not putting anything up today, but I just don’t have it in me today.

The War on Flour

Via Talk Left, the latest in the War on Your Neighbor Drugs:

When college freshman Janet Lee packed her bags for a Christmas trip home two years ago, her luggage contained three condoms filled with flour — a stress-relief contraption that she and some friends made as part of a dorm project.

Philadelphia International Airport screeners found the condoms, and their initial tests showed they contained drugs. The Bryn Mawr College student was arrested on drug trafficking charges and jailed. Three weeks later, she was released after a lab test backed her story.

Lee filed a federal lawsuit last week against city police, seeking damages for pain and suffering, financial loss, and emotional distress. She was arrested on Dec. 21, 2003, and was held on $500,000 bail and faced up to 20 years in prison had she been convicted of the drug charges.

***

Airport screeners found the condoms filled with white powder in Lee’s checked luggage shortly before she was to board a plane to Los Angeles to visit her family. She said she told city police they were filled with flour and that they were stress-relievers, not drug packages.

Police told her a field test showed that the powder contained opium and cocaine, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. A lab test later proved the substance was flour — and prosecutors dropped the charges, the newspaper reported Thursday.

I hope she wins (despite how mind-bogglingly stupid I think it is to have four condoms filled with flour), and wins everything she is asking for. I do take issue with this aspect of the Penn Live write-up:

Many records in the case remain confidential, inaccessible even to Lee’s lawyers.

“I believed her story because things just didn’t add up,” Oh said.

The field tests were odd because they detected the presence of not one drug but three, he said.

“People don’t mix drugs like that,” Oh said.

Oh yeah? Explain this:

In all seriousness, though, I hope she wins. Big.

Commenter Pet Blogging

Frequent commenter Krista suggested that I feature some pics of the pets from you commenters. You ask, I deliver.

Here are some snapshots of frequent commenter Stormy’s pets.

Cato, Jezzy, and Little Kitty in one big pile of warm and fur.

Meadow, on the floor lounging.

If you have some pics of your loved ones, send ‘em in. I will put up one set of pictures a day until there are no more to feature.

WaPo Does Abramoff

In honor of global phenomenon and resident fly-in-the-ointment DougJ, here’s your link to one of the best Abramoff wrap-ups yet written, by Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi at the Washington Post.

A reconstruction of the lobbyist’s rise and fall shows that he was an ingenious dealmaker who hatched interlocking schemes that exploited the machinery of government and trampled the norms of doing business in Washington — sometimes for clients but more often to serve his desire for wealth and influence. This inside account of Abramoff’s career is drawn from interviews with government officials and former associates in the lobbying shops of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP; thousands of court and government records; and hundreds of e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as those released by Senate investigators.

…Abramoff’s lobbying team was made up of Republicans and a few Democrats, most of whom he had wined and dined when they were aides to powerful members of Congress. They signed on for the camaraderie, the paycheck, the excitement.

“Everybody lost their minds,” recalled a former congressional staffer who lobbied with Abramoff at Preston Gates. “Jack was cutting deals all over town. Staffers lost their loyalty to members — they were loyal to money.”

A senior Preston Gates partner warned him to slow down or he would be “dead, disgraced or in jail.” Those within Abramoff’s circle also saw the danger signs. Their boss had become increasingly frenzied about money and flouted the rules. “I’m sensing shadiness. I’ll stop asking,” one associate, Todd Boulanger, e-mailed a colleague.

The first act, of course, introduces a seemingly unstoppable hero and his seemingly-minor tragic flaw.

…Even in those early days, there were hints of the troubles to come. “If anyone is not surprised at the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff, it is me,” said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Abramoff and his crew busted the College Republicans’ budget with a 1982 national direct-mail fundraising campaign that ended up “a colossal flop,” said Bond, then deputy director of the party’s national committee. He said he banished the three from GOP headquarters, telling Abramoff: “You can’t be trusted.”

You can just imagine an eleven-year-old Abramoff borrowing against dad’s car to swing the sixth-grade class elections. Ah, the memories.

Abramoff wallowed in his access, real and imagined. When his crack administrative assistant Susan Ralston bolted for a position with White House political adviser Karl Rove, Abramoff told colleagues he had gotten her the job even though it was Ralston’s old boss, Reed, who made it happen, her former colleagues said.

Even glowing profiles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal noting Abramoff’s extensive influence and impressive income were not enough. Abramoff quietly paid op-ed columnists thousands of dollars to write favorably about his clients, including one writer for Copley News Service who disclosed this month that he had been paid for as many as two dozen columns since the mid-1990s.

When you tally up the respective efforts of the various corners of the Executive branch, Abramoff and the Pentagon you get a picture of some awfully busy little media whores.

And of course, the inevitable closing of the third act.

Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal — the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which six House members and one senator were convicted — said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently rode in a plane with one of Abramoff’s attorneys, who told him: “There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to be taken down.”

I’ve barely quoted a tenth of the juicy stuff. Read, weep, discuss.

More Abramoff coverage here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

***Update***

Via a commenter, is Steno Sue up to her usual tricks? Atrios argues that the point of this whole exercise may be to undercut Abramoff’s credibility if he flips. I have to admit that the part about DeLay barely even knowing Abramoff’s first name (or whatever she’s implying) sounded pretty strange. The suggestion that DeLay is some backwoods fundie who can’t shake hands with a Jew insults the intelligence a bit more every time I think about it.

Congratulations are in Order

Mr. and Mrs. Vodkapundit give birth to what we will assume is a young Formulapundit. For now, at least.

Congrats!

Health Care, Coming to a Government Near You

I have stated repeatedly that I think the fight over some form of nationalized health care is over, and that we will one day have a European-style system in place. The only question is when big business will successfully pressure the government to take over and how much of their current health care funding responsibilities they can manage to lay at the feet of government.

Yesterday, the NY Times has a piece stating that some of the real firm opposition to nationalized health care comes from, of all places, unions:

Most advocates of universal health care focus on the opposition of Republicans and insurance companies. But perhaps the most important factor keeping an overhaul off the national agenda is one that few Democrats acknowledge: most of Mr. Gettelfinger’s fellow labor leaders don’t support a single-payer system either.

The reason comes down to simple self-interest. The United Auto Workers is one of the few private-sector unions that doesn’t run its own health plan. Rather, most have created huge companies to administer their workers’ plans, giving them a large and often corrupt stake in the current system.

Opposition to a national health care plan is as much a part of the American trade union tradition as the picket line. It goes back to Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, who railed at early Congressional efforts to pass a law mandating employer coverage as Britain had done, which he said had “taken much of the virility out of the British unions.”

This line of thinking led to the notorious decision in 1991 by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s health care committee to reject a proposal that the federation support a single-payer plan. The majority said a national system simply had no chance in Congress, but others saw a conflict of interest: government-supplied health care would put union-run plans out of business.

Which, of course, would mean that opposition to nationalized health care would create some strange bedfellows. Anyone have more on this?

*** Update ***

More here from Ezra Klein.

The Saga of John Demjanjuk

When I read this, I flashed back to my teens when this first hit my radar:

An immigration judge on Wednesday ordered John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, deported to his native Ukraine, but the 30-year legal battle still may not be over.

Mr. Demjanjuk, 85, has been fighting to stay in this country since the 1970′s.

The United States first tried to deport him in 1977. Mistakenly suspected of being a guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp, he was extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to be hanged.

But the Israeli Supreme Court determined that Ivan had been someone else.

Mr. Demjanjuk lost his United States citizenship in 2002 after a judge ruled that documents from World War II proved he was a Nazi guard at various death or forced labor camps.

Have any of you followed this case and have an idea whether or not he really is who he is accused of being? I would have thought the ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court would have ended things, but apparently it has not.

Taking Tom Tancredo To Task

In what I can only describe as the op-ed version of a nine paragraph sneer, the Opinion Journal mockingly derides Tom Tancredo and his immigration legislation:

So there you have it. Tom Tancredo has done everyone a favor by stating plainly the immigration rejectionists’ endgame–turn the United States into the world’s largest gated community. The House took a step in that direction this month by passing another immigration “reform” bill heavy with border control and business harassment and light on anything that will work in the real world.

***

Given that record, it’s hard to see the House Republican bill as much more than preening about illegal immigration. The legislation is aimed at placating a small but vocal constituency that wants the borders somehow sealed, come what may to the economy, American traditions of liberty or the Republican Party’s relationship with the increasingly important Latino vote.

Besides mandating the construction of walls and fences along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, the bill radically expands the definition of terms like “alien smuggler,” “harboring,” “shielding” and “transporting.” Hence all manner of people would become criminally liable and subject to fines, property forfeiture and imprisonment–the landscaper who gives a co-worker a ride to a job; the legal resident who takes in an undocumented relative; a Catholic Charities shelter providing beds and meals to anyone who walks through the door.

Read the whole thing. Obviously, the WSJ’s pro-business leanings are what motivated this piece, but it is striking in how mercilously they attack Tancredo.

All Your Computers Are Belong To Us

NSA site installed ‘illegal’ cookies:

The National Security Agency’s Internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.

The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake.

Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program.

“Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern,” said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. “But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government’s very basic rules for Web privacy.”

Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035.

The question I want answered is “Why are they even installing cookies at all?” Again, I am not going to move to Montana and go off the grid because of this (add to it I have never been to the NSA site), but I do want to know why this was even done in the first place.

*** Update ***

Not sure why some of you think I thought this was a big deal, because I don’t. That is why I had quotes o’ sarcasm around ‘illegal.’ All I wanted to know was why NSA would even bother to install cookies, and this explanation from the comments seems to be the best description of what probably happened:

Their files are all .cfm, which strongly implies that their website was developed using Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion handles session state data by storing a session key in a user cookie. In all likelihood, they didn’t know or didn’t remember to turn off the creation of these session cookies.

Cookies are passed from the browser to the appropriate site when an HTTP request is made. There’s no way that a NSA cookie could give the NSA information it doesn’t already have, unless the NSA was embeddeding content in other websites. And that would be obvious, because hiding it would make it not work.

If anything, this story serves to discredit those who are bleating about it.

Fighting Dems?

A month or so back I remarked to John that there seemed like a large number of Iraq vets running as Democrats these days, an observation that came largely from Kos’s efforts in pointing them out. John asked how many Republicans there were, and since I didn’t know we both shrugged our shoulders and moved on. The question matters because as everybody knows both sides are recruiting desperately for 2006, and the side which troops choose says any number of things about the mindset of the actual grunts prosecuting this war. A gross imbalance, depending on which side it fell, would be either a slap in the face of the yellow-ribbon-on-an-SUV crowd or else a vindication of their smug self-superiority.

Today Kos provides hard numbers on both sides: the Democrats have recruited thirty-six Iraq veterans, according to this article. Depending on whether you count Iraq veterans or all veterans, about which there seems to be some confusion, Kos asserts that the Republicans have recruited either one or two. Kos does not support the claim, so don’t be 100% eager to take it for granted.

I will watch the fallout of this particular windfall with interest. Paul Hackett nearly upset the most conservative county in Ohio, and unless Bush gains the ability to heal the sick through your television set whatever bounce Hackett got from Bush fatigue will be ten times more severe by 2006.

So what will the GOP do? Swiftboating seems likely. I’m eager to find out whether they have the cajones cojones to try it thirty-six times.