ROBERTS RISES
WAR FESTERS, MILLER WALKS
DISSECTOR TRAVELS

I was up extra early yesterday to post my jeremiad against Da Judge. Clearly, I was a bit late to the party, and also unprepared for how quick the Roberts coronation would be, or how fallible our technology is becoming. No sooner did a day’s work go up then it went down, like Humpty Dumpty taking that fall. I wasn’t surprised when some readers suspected there may have been more to MediaChannel’s misfortune. Timothy Michel wrote:

Is the “News Dissector” being “Cyber Attacked” or “Stormed” to prevent regular readers from accessing your feeds, or is the traffic just so great that you may need to consider a server farm?

Hear Ye, Hear Ye: I’d like believe in the super-sized power of dissection to stem the tide, but our tech troubles don’t rise to such a level. We had the Scotch tape out and we are trying to fix it, while watching Roberts invoke the dreadful memory of Rehnquist as he consummated the first Bushification of the Supreme Court.

DRIVEN CRAZY

At least some people I respect — like Tom Englehart — cheered my attempt to put my finger in the dike of democracy:

Your latest is remarkable. I’ve just been emailing it to whomever I could think of who could write about it. Back at the end of July I wrote a piece, “Stop, Thief!” about the role of Roberts in the 2000 election in which I concluded:

It is remarkable really. If the Democrats were an actual opposition party, if they were really a party at all, the Roberts nomination would be an open-and-shut case, no need to consider Roberts’ record on abortion or anything else. Why, after all, would a party that believed a presidential election had essentially been stolen from it by the Supreme Court in 2000 (and perhaps again in 2004 via voter suppression and other techniques in Ohio) agree even to consider the candidacy of a legal partisan who clearly had an unknown but all-too-real hand in taking the election from them, or do anything but demand the withdrawal of his nomination on the threat of a sustainable filibuster? As the other political party, don’t they even care about futures elections? It seems, however, that the Democrats in Congress, after much shuffling and hemming and hawing, will take the sharpened razor handed them by the President and slit their own wrists.

(http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=9053)

It’s driven me crazy that not a Democrat seems to have even asked about the 2000 elections during the hearings!

FREED JUDY MILLER WILL TALK, SOURCES SAY

WASHINGTON (AP) — After nearly three months behind bars, New York Times reported Judith Miller was released from a federal prison Thursday after agreeing to testify in the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA officer, two people familiar with the case said.

Ms. Miller left the federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., after reaching an agreement with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Legal sources said she would appear before a grand jury investigation the case Friday morning. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings.

The sources said Ms. Miller agreed to testify after securing an unconditional release from Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to testify about any discussions they had involving CIA officer Valerie Plame.

NO END IN SIGHT

And the war goes on. Another “bad day,” with more U.S. and Iraqi deaths. General Casey told Congress that Iraq is now down to only one trained brigade (from three), and is “conditioning” his projections of troop withdrawals. Over on CBS, it was noted that even that not even one brigade would survive without U.S. support. “Insurgencies tend to last nine years,” the strategists said. So, it ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS ONLINE

Via PRWEB:

September 22, 2005 — Anti-war statements from U.S. soldiers who have served in the Iraq War (OIF) appear online now at Video.Google.Com. Metropole Filmworx LLC choose Video.Google.Com as a distribution method for clips of soldier videos in order to insure they would be available on demand in time for the September 23, 2005 protest in Washington, DC, led by Cindy Sheehan.

Metropole Filmworx LLC has been recording interviews with soldiers who have returned from Iraq since March. The footage collected will be used in their documentary BACK FROM IRAQ: The Citizen Soldier Speaks. They have posted clips from several interviews online at Video.Google.Com in order to make sure that congressional representatives and the general public are aware that Cindy Sheehan speaks for many, many soldiers when she says the War in Iraq must be brought to a swift conclusion.

video.google.com/videosearch?q=metropole&pl=1

Tony Karon sees the Administration as more out of touch than ever:

With another vote looming, the President trots out the familiar “violence will escalate” line to reassure the public that Iraq may look out of control, but it’s all going according to plan. They did this before the handover of sovereignty, and before the January election. Violence escalated. But the point is, it didn’t decrease after those “milestones,” it continued to escalate. And the same will happen this time. The idea that these elections will turn the tide against the insurgency is a fallacy.

http://tonykaron.com/2005/09/29/prophylactic-spin-on-iraq/

ISRAEL STILL IN CONTROL

Amira Haas writes in Ha’aretz:

Commentators in the media and elsewhere proclaimed after the disengagement from Gaza that “the frontier posts in the Strip are now international crossings,” and that “removing Israeli control of access to Gaza is in line with the national interest of ending the occupation.”

These conclusions were based on a systemic ignorance of the nuances in the Israeli control over the Palestinians. Mainly they reflect the lack of desire to know that Israel controls the Palestinian population registration. This state of affairs began in 1967, continued after signing the Oslo Accords and still exists today, after the Israel Defense Forces’ pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s control of the border crossings and the Palestinians’ freedom of movement is not reflected merely in Israel’s presence in roadblocks and border passes. It derives first and foremost from controlling the Palestinian population registration. Identity numbers, births, deaths, marriages, changing addresses - if these details have not been updated in Israel’s Interior Ministry computers, they don’t exist.

RESOURCE: A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT

The House Committee on Government Reform has published a new edition of its popular “Citizen’s Guide on Using the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act of 1974 to Request Government Records.”

The Guide, first published in 1977, “is one of the most widely read congressional committee reports in history,” the new edition says. A copy of the updated Guide, House Report 109-226, September 20, 2005, is available.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/foia/citizen.html