October 2007 archive

The Hubble took a picture of the same spot for 10 consecutive days so astronomers could create this image.  This picture is of the newly born galaxies as they were about 12 billion years ago. 
(This really doesn’t have anything to do with dark matter–but I like the picture)

Then read this.  Seriously.

That is why the Republican party is in shambles. The majority of us have decided that the movers and shakers in the GOP and the blogospheric right are certified lunatics who, in a decent and sane society, we would have in controlled environments in rocking chairs under shade trees for most of the day, wheeled in at night for tapioca pudding and some karaoke.

Originally published at Talk Left in October 2006. Warning, will likely put you to sleep.

Scott Lemieux pens a very interesting article on the Dred Scott decision and its merits  and meaning in today's law and politics. It is worth reading in its entirety but  I want to focus on a few points made by Lemieux:

. . . George W. Bush — demonstrating the forthright advocacy of conservative jurisprudence for which Republicans are famous — went out of his way to assure the public during one of the 2004 presidential debates that he would not, in fact, appoint Supreme Court justices who would interfere with the ability of Congress to ban slavery in Puerto Rico. Bush's strange remarks were widely interpereted as a dog-whistle signal to his anti-abortion-rights base, some of whose intellectuals (most notably Justice Scalia in his dissents in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg v, Carhart) have compared Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Jeffrey Rosen turned this comparison against Scalia in his merciless evisceration of the justice's support for the Court's egregious Bush v. Gore decision. And on it goes. But should this much weight really be put on Dredd Scott?

. . . The most common attack on Dred Scott, however, does not concern the finer points of interpretive theory. Rather, it's a critique borne out of a romanticized view of legislatures as being better able to resolve difficult social questions than courts. . . .

It may have been the most common attack but it was not the best one. Abraham Lincoln, most notably in his Cooper Union address, presented, to me at least, the most devastating arguments against the legal correctness of the Dred Scott decision. I'll discuss that and a few other things on the other side.

Another addition of Sign of the Times…

ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) — Topps Meat Co. LLC, the meat company responsible for the second-largest beef recall in U.S. history, said Friday it will close its plant in Elizabeth, N.J., and go out of business, effective immediately.

Topps on Sept. 25 began a recall of its frozen hamburger meat that was expanded to comprise 21.7 million pounds of the meat, which may be contaminated with E. coli after federal inspectors discovered inadequate safety measures at its plant.

“In one week we have gone from the largest U.S. manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large,” he said.

Here is the USDA recall page.

Countdown ’til some clueless Gooper argues that meddling big government agencies are bad for the economy. 

In 3…2…1….

Update:
Topps Meat Company, LLC, a privately held company, is apparently not the same firm as Topps Company, Inc., a public company (NASDAQ NM: Topp) that makes sports trading cards.

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started. Toss the lucky man into the Nile and he will come up with a fish in his mouth.

1. This Sunday, here are three different views of life for the people in occupied Iraq.

   • For Iraqi Christians, James Palmer of the Washington Post reports they either ‘Live In Fear Or Flee‘. “Extreme Islamic militants increasingly are targeting Christians in Iraq, especially in the capital. As a result, Iraq’s Christian community — long the minority in a largely Muslim country — continues to dwindle.”

     The last Iraqi census was conducted in 1987 and counted 1 million Christians. “National aid groups estimate that between 300,000 and 600,000 Christians remain among an estimated 25 million people” in Iraq. Many Iraqi Christians have been given three choices: 1) convert to Islam, 2) pay “protection” money, or 3) leave.

   • For Iraqis who work for Americans, Sabrina Tavernise reports ‘In Life of Lies, Iraqis Conceal Work for U.S.‘ “For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths. Desperate for work of any kind when jobs are extremely hard to come by in Iraq, they do what they must, even though affiliation with the Americans makes them targets.”

     The Iraqis who work for the Americans construct elaborate, complex lies to cover their work, where they go and what they do. They live in constant peril of having their cover blown by casual conversation or even their own children. Often their complex stories turn and pose problems for them. Other Iraqis, believing the workers’ cover stories, often ask them to do things, fix things, make things only their alibi could do… further putting them at risk.

   • Finally, for an Iraqi family trying to leave Iraq, opportunities to immigrate prove elusive. As an Iraqi, anonymous fro security reasons, writing for the Los Angeles Times explains in ‘After leaving Iraq, a bitter return home‘.

     I never knew how badly I wanted to leave Iraq until I was forced to come back… Even though we both were making good money in Iraq, we flew to the UAE in December to take the tests required to work there as pharmacists…

     Life was different there — no explosions, no blackouts. We would go out in the evenings, doing whatever we liked without fear of militias or religious extremists… Even our baby girl, who was too young to understand what was happening, had more fun… For us, a small family, it was a piece of heaven…

     After two months, my application for a work visa still had not come through. I had to leave the UAE because my visitor’s visa was about to expire, but I was confident my work visa would come through…

     My wife says it is our bad luck to be Iraqis. ‘This bad luck is stuck to us forever,’ she said after the visa was rejected. I think she is right.

The rest of today’s Four at Four is lurking below the fold.

2. An update on what comes next from Burmese activists and a report on a secret junta crematorium in Burma.

3. Three stories relating to Blackwater in the “Guns of Greed” section.

4. The arrest of American Indian Movement leader Russell Means yesterday.

Plus a bonus story about the fate that awaits Pacific Northwest salmon from global warming. So dive in, there’s a lot more below the fold…

Give Peace a Chance

Barry MacGuire:  Eve of Destruction