Oopsie Doopsie

The feds are investigating whether Christine O'Donnell misused campaign money. She denies it of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if the allegations were true. Not because I think Christine O'Donnell is corrupt, but because she seems like the kind of person who would consider getting a manicure before a big political rally should be considered a legitimate expense.

Yay! Death Panels

When the opponents to Obamacare were trying to come up with ways to make it sound scary, they thought up "death panels". It is the job of these panels, they claimed, to review whose granny gets her plug pulled to save money to care for the next person. What was actually in the legislation is a provision that would pay for a person to consult their doctor about what they would like done should they ever end up a vegetable and unable to make decisions about their own care. They would see their doctor, the doctor would tell them their options, be it staying on life support indefinitely or a DNR, and Obama's health care package would cover that doctor visit.

Opponents of this cite Terri Schiavo as an example of its dangers, but, ironically, if Terri Schiavo had had this option, she could have gotten her wishes down on record, and could possibly still be alive today. Fortunately, it looks like this consultation will be covered by Medicare as of January 1st despite the ridiculous opposition against it.

Palin Doesn't Understand Conservationism

"Where do you think those pencils and paper came from?" Yeah, they came from trees. We all know that. The point is that we'd like to continue to get those things from trees. In order to do that you need to harvest them sustainably. And this doesn't just apply to trees, but everything else that can only be replaced at a finite rate.

Birthers Again

The newly inaugurated Governor of Hawaii says he wants to change the laws keeping Obama's hospital birth records private. He hopes this will put an end to the conspiracy theories about him being born in Kenya, or wherever.

It won't, of course. The birthers are crazy and will reject any evidence given to them. Obama has already shown his birth certificate, and after the initial wave of accusations that it was a fake, they said, "oh well, that a 'certification of live birth' not a birth certificate! We want the real birth certificate has the name of the doctor who delivered him and the hospital where he was born." Now, I don't know what kind of birth certificates these people have, but my birth certificate doesn't list any of those things. I've never seen a birth certificate that does. What these people want are Obama's medical records. They argue that foreign born babies can get birth certificates issued by the state of Hawaii. This is true, but the way that works is if you were born in a hospital in Wellington and your parents brought you home to Hawaii instead of applying for a birth certificate from the government of New Zealand, you could then get a Hawaii birth certificate that says you were born in Wellington, New Zealand, and they would ask for hospital records to confirm even that.

Chris Matthews wants to know why Obama hasn't just asked the state of Hawaii to release those records. Well, the first reason is that it obviously wouldn't convince them so there's no point. The second is that if people believe your birth certificate to be fraudulent and ask to see your private medical records to prove that it isn't, it is, I think, at that point, perfectly reasonable to tell them to fuck off.

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.