Excellent!

(er...that was to msbelle and mac; not the partisan cheerleaders)

YAY

I have skipped and now regret it. Find out what?

Then I saw this article in the morning paper and knew I had to share it with Tep.

"He has gigantic hands,''

What a nice way to perk up my workday!

Msbelle, how exciting!

The football player's pretty cute, too (there's a photo with that article). Best part was finding out that "the CFL measures just about every aspect of a player before the draft." Hmmmmm, I say.

Speaking of winter coming, yesterday I told the Blue-Eyed Boy that soon it would be dark when he got up to go to school and dark when he came home. Being six, he thought that was kewl instead of depressing.

On my flight back from the UK yesterday, they showed a PSA on What To Expect If You're A Nasty And Suspicious Looking Foreigner Coming To Our Glorious Shores Of Liberty and Wonderfulness (note: not real title), and it was...scary. Not even so much that non-US citizens are required to digitally scan in their fingerprints before entering the country, but the tone of the video gave me deep deep chills. "Welcome to America, where we only want to track your every movement because we love you so very very much! Almost as much as we love FREEDOM!"

That, and the jackass immigration agent (giving DH shit about being born in Pakistan, made a "yuk" face when we told him we'd been in Europe -- hello, you're a freaking immigration officer! The only people you see all day are people who are returning from countries which are not America!) gave me a very bad taste in my mouth about coming back.

The NY Times finally finds its spine:

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

[link]

Still more on that incredibly crappy legislation (Salon link):

"Everything we don't believe in"

As he prepared to vote against the Bush administration's detainee legislation Wednesday, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich put it about as well as anybody could. "This bill," he said, "is everything we don't believe in."

That's the short version.

In a letter sent to members of Congress this week, 609 law professors offer the long one:

"Taken together, the bill’s provisions rewrite American law to evade the fundamental principles of separation of powers, due process, habeas corpus, fair trials, and the rule of law, principles that, together, prohibit state-sanctioned violence. If there is any fixed point in the historical understandings of constitutional freedom that help to define us as a people, it is that no one may be picked up and locked up by the American state in secret or at an unknown location, or without opportunity to petition an independent court for inspection of the lawfulness of the lockup and of the treatment handed out by the state to the person locked up, under legal standards from time to time defined by Congress. This core principle should apply with full force to all detentions by the American state, regardless of the citizenship of detainees."

The professors cite three specific objections to the legislation: its denial of habeas corpus review for detainees who aren't U.S. citizens; its empowering of the president to "to decide which techniques violate the Geneva Conventions for purposes of criminal sanction under the War Crimes Act, so long as they do not fall within the category of 'grave breaches'"; and its abandonment of "our longstanding constitutional protections against punishing people on the basis of coerced testimony and against denying individuals the opportunity to defend themselves through access to exculpatory evidence known to the government."

That federal judge who ruled in the Dover Intelligent Design case? The Republican appointed by Bush?

Received death threats. [link]

I'm not at all surprised.