Assange's Extradition

Having come to terms with the fact that publishing leaked documents is not, in itself, a crime, the US is apparently working on a way to accuse him of having ordered the documents to be leaked, or aided the leaker. Given the breadth of what really counts as espionage, it is conceivably possible for Assange to be convicted if the person responsible for the leak asked if he wanted them and Assange said "yes". He's considerably screwed if he brought it up first, like, "hey, do happen to have any secret or classified documents you can give me?"

Or what they could argue is that WikiLeaks itself, by the very nature of its existence, is an invitation to leak documents, making the whole organization a kind of bizarrely open spy ring. That argument might not fly, but we'll see if Eric Holder has the balls to make it.

Prior Restraint

Like Nixon's attempt to keep the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers (see New York Times Co. v. United States), no attempt to keep WikiLeaks from publishing the documents they have will be successful. Even if they can find a way to prosecute Assange for publishing what he has, the US government can't stop any of the other documents from coming out unless they contain specific information endangering specific people.

Arguably, some of the documents already released have given away the identities of people working as informants for the US in Afghanistan, but, so far, nobody seems to have been killed because of it. As long as WikiLeaks takes care to keep people who may become targets under wraps, the US really has no way to keep the rest of the documents from coming out.

Is Assange a Spy?

I think this video sums it up.



It should also be noted that Joe Lieberman believes it may be worth the trouble to investigate the New York Times for publishing the info posted on WikiLeaks.

The Fact That Amazon Is Uncrashable Is the Reason It Hosted Wikileaks in the First Place

Anonymous has been trying to take down Amazon.com with a DDoS all day for refusing to continue to host space for Wikileaks. This would be quite a blow if it could be done, as it would shut off the flow of all that sweet Christmas shopping money. But because it is prepared for ridiculous amounts of traffic over the holidays, overloading it's servers is next to impossible.

In fact, the reason Wikileaks was being hosted by Amazon in the first place is that it has so much extra server space to handle the extra traffic that rents a lot of it out to other websites.

We'll See How they Like Him When He Gets Some of Russia's Secrets.

Russia wants Julian Assange to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Normally a guy going around giving away everybody's secrets would not attract the affections of Russia, but

"Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership appears to have come round to WikiLeaks, having decided that the ongoing torrent of disclosures are ultimately far more damaging and disastrous to America's long-term geopolitical interests than they are to Russia's."

That may all change, of course, once he gets proof of Putin's involvement in the poisoning of Yukashchenko, or Litvinenko.

"Harmful" Books

Wikipedia's article on Human Events magazine has its list of the ten "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries". Here it is, this is great:

1. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, by Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
8. The Course in Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

Now, nobody's gonna argue about Mein Kampf, except for the fact that it is below The Communist Manifesto, which, although a lot of grief came from the implementation of its ideas, was not a call for hatred and genocide, so, if I were compiling this list, I'd put Hitler's book somewhat higher than the Marx books and Mao's book. Of course, just behind Nazism and Communism is Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Conservative's hate this book because it put an end to the credibility of claims by conservative males that they never masturbate.

Democracy and Education dared to claim that a person's personality is formed by a combination of inborn inclinations and environmental factors, leading foolish liberals to believe that criminal behavior may be caused by something other than demonic possession.

The Feminine Mystique pointed out that some women may actually have ambitions beyond simply being wives and mothers.

The Course in Positive Philosophy made the obviously satanic claim that belief should be based on reason and evidence.

Beyond Good and Evil annoys everybody by getting into the hands of sophomore arts majors, and the ideas in Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ended the Great Depression, but did so without advocating tax cuts and therefore must be forever banned.

SUBPOENA POWER!!!

Now that the Pugs control the House, they can start Ken Starr-style witch hunts against the Obama administration like they did to the Clinton administration. What will they prosecute him for, you ask? Well, "[a]reas ripe for investigation include Obama's health care policy, its response to the BP oil spill, and the multibillion-dollar bailouts of automakers, banks and the troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

In other words, they're going to throw whatever bullshit allegations they can think of at him until they find something people will fall for.