Bloggy

Kind of as an aside, I’ve moved my blog to some webhosting which I finally got around to purchasing. I plan on moving the rest of the major stuff off my computer someday. Uh, soon maybe? I dunno. Either way, my blog is moved (some links may be broken unfortunately).

Where was I? Oh yes, Congress. First they go and make torture legal (the only things you are not allowed to do are apparently murder, certain types of rape, and killing an organ). As an extra added bonus, they also removed that neato provision of habeas corpus which is so important, it’s right in the Constitution (i.e. it’s not even relegated to the Bill of Rights, it’s right in the text of the Constitution). Habeas corpus is so important to Anglo-American law that it is referred to simply as The Great Writ. You can read more about habeas corpus at Wikipedia. Also I haven’t seen it clarified as to whether it’s OK if the prisoner dies on accident, or if it’s only illegal if the prisoner is deliberately murdered.

I mean, I can’t believe I’m writing this. The Congress has said that torture is OK, when I believe it was just 2003 (after Abu Ghraib) that the Senate passed McCain’s anti-torture bill (for the U.S. Army) 90-10? What the hell changed since then?

I mean, the law is so unconstitutional on its very face that the first court to breathe wind of it is going to overturn it. Even our Supreme Court would overturn it. I mean, it’s clear as day in the Constitution. “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Rebellion? Nope. Invasion? I haven’t seen one. The only conclusion I can think of is political gain (the midterm elections are near after all), but what a lousy, lousy reason to throw away one America’s most cherished civil liberties. Especially with a law that erodes human rights for anyone the President says, including U.S. Citizens. (Basically you just have to be declared an enemy combatant, and your future is no longer in your hands). The interested may read this conservative analysis of the issue.

Best part is that one of the torture techniques mentioned that we might be using is “waterboarding”, which is apparently devastatingly effective (at coercing confessions, not intel). Read all about it thanks to David Corn.

The worst part is that torture doesn’t even work. Someone who is tortured will tell you something to make the pain stop. That’s it. Oh, he’ll throw out names all day, invent plots left and right if necessary. I mean geez, since when did we start adopting Al Qaeda’s interrogation tactics??

In more domestic (but no less depressing) news, one of our intrepid Congressman (Rep. Foley, from Florida) has resigned after lots and lots of evidence came out about him soliciting underage male Congressional pages. Read the ABC News story. That’s ok, I’ll wait. Back? Disgusting, isn’t it?

Know what the best part is? (There’s always a best part) The Republican House leadership knew. This was reported to them a year ago. One claims to have investigated and found nothing. Except, he investigating by asking Foley if he did anything wrong. I mean, I can’t imagine why a Congressman accused of pedophilia would deny it. There was no further investigation. The Republican House leadership left this man to sit as Co-Chair of the “Missing and Exploited Children Caucus”. Of course, that didn’t stop people involved in the Congressional page program from warning one class about Foley (detailed in the linked ABC News story).

This wasn’t just one page either. This man was able to use his position, and the fact that the Republican House leadership did nothing to stop him, to send sexually explicit emails or instant messages to (it seems) at least 3 different pages. I mean, sexual impropriety is one thing, but pedophilia is quite another entirely. But what I just CANNOT get over is the fact that nothing was done a year ago when the House leadership was informed that there were some issues with this man. How does a Party whose whole platform the past 3 elections has been values allow this to happen? (The answer of course, is that they don’t care about values, at least not anymore than their opponents do)

And this one hasn’t hit the mainstream media yet (I assume they’re still trying to digest Foley), but apparently even more Army brass think this Iraq thing wasn’t a great idea.

This entry is long but to throw something of use to Planet KDE, SadEagle has fixed a few bugs with plugins not starting up unless you resize windows in Konqueror. Apparently this was due to a fix for an Adobe Acrobat Reader problem. Either way, plugins should start up correctly now. (Except for one case, if you have plugins setup to run only have you click “Start Plugin” you may have to resize the window. SadEagle provided a patch for it but still has to test it). If you want to try it out, nspluginviewer is in kdebase, not kdelibs as I thought. :-)

Also, I ripped code from my old kdesvn-pywizard program to contribute a PyQt frontend for the upstream log-submission utility (their site may be down. Gotta love PHP). Unfortunately I won’t have time to maintain it, but it apparently actually works, so yay.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Political |