Gates stays on

This is exceptionally good news.

Secretary Gates has many good qualities, but one in particular that holds promise for the future is his willingness to hold people accountable. In this he has been almost a singular figure in the Bush administration, which otherwise can only find reason to fire people when they offer honest opinions that are at variance with the official line.

This suggests that Obama, too, will be willing to value candor over toadying and competence over connections.

Gates has done an awful lot of good in his tenure so far. It's a pity that Bush stuck with Rumsfeld so long.

Riots in Iceland!

Something I never thought I'd see:

http://www.france24.com/en/20081123-protests-geir-haarde-resignation-financial-crisis-iceland

But maybe not the last place.

The last time we had a depression some very unsavory movements resulted. I don't think human nature has changed.

More McCarthy foolishness

McCarthy admits the obvious, but then lapses into excuse-making again at The Corner:

It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here. Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information. We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions.
All that said, though, Judge Leon concluded that “[t]o rest [combatant detention] on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation.” That is puzzling. There is nothing in the training of a judge that makes him an expert in military matters. In our system of divided government, the question of who is an enemy combatant should be committed to the executive brach — specifically, to the military professionals waging the war. If there is any evidence supporting the military's wartime decision to detain (and, to reiterate, Judge Leon said there was sufficient evidence to hold these men for intelligence purposes), the court should defer to the military judgment.

It takes very little imagination to think of many ways in which evidence sufficient to detain someone for intelligence gathering purposes would be completely inadequate to justify indefinite detention. In a civilian context similar things happen with material witnesses, police investigations and even protective custody.

Kathleen Parker tells the truth

I guess she "got religion" so to speak and her eye-opening exposure to the Wingnuts has set her free.

So here she nails the GOP problem: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111802886.html

Pirates!!

The pirate problem, unaddressed, naturally gets worse: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e10892ba-b4a8-11dd-b780-0000779fd18c.html

There's a lot of hand-wringing going on right now and eventually action will be required.

And everybody already knows what that action will have to be.

Intercepting pirates on the high seas is a stop gap measure and one very limited in effectiveness. It's better than doing nothing, but is no solution. The ocean is too big.

Since Roman times every maritime nation dealing with piracy has found that the only permanent solution is to clear out the pirate bases. If there's no power strong enough or with enough will to do the messy work then the pirates will flourish. Sooner or later the Somali coast will have to be cleaned up and the pirates suppressed at the source. The best solution would be for local authorities to do this, but it's been a generation since Somalia had a real government and there's slim prospects for any change on that front. So it will have to be the maritime powers, and especially the U.S. Navy doing it.

And so the wheels of justice slowly begin to turn

Scott Horton explains how the wheels of justice are slowly beginning to turn on Ameircan war crimes:

Quoting Judge Patricia Wald, a former judge on the Serbian war crimes tribunal:

Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.

There should be no confusion about what is being said here. One of America’s most prominent judges–and one of our few judicial experts on war crimes–is saying that the factual basis exists to charge officials of the Bush Administration. The test is fairly simple: is the United States now prepared to apply to itself the same legal standards that the United States applied to political leaders in the former Yugoslavia? It is in the end a simple question of justice. And a question of whether the United States is prepared itself to live by the standards it imposes on others.
Full site:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003859

The best article ever on the financial meltdown

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true#page1