One of my favorite blogs, that I have not linked to recently, is Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. It has always incurred the wrath of the right wing. No surprise there. But it has also recently caught a lot of flack from the left side of the aisle. Cole is no pacifist, and he has not been supportive of the idea of a simple withdrawal from Iraq. For some, that is unacceptable. Not me. Maybe it comes from having two nephews serving in the military. Maybe I’m just too MOR. Maybe I just distrust simple minded solutions.

Against that backdrop, you can see why I really like his recent Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005

1. The guerrilla war is being waged only in four provinces…
2. Iraqi Sunnis voting in the December 15 election is a sign that they are being drawn into the political process and might give up the armed insurgency…
3. Iraqis are grateful for the US presence and want US forces there to help them build their country…
4. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, born in Iran in 1930, is close to the Iranian regime in Tehran…
5. There is a silent majority of middle class, secular-minded Iraqis who reject religious fundamentalism…
6. The new Iraqi constitution is a victory for Western, liberal values in the Middle East…
7. Iraq is already in a civil war, so it does not matter if the US simply withdraws precipitately, since the situation is as bad as it can get…
8. The US can buy off the Iraqis now supporting guerrilla action against US troops…
9. The Bush administration wanted free elections in Iraq…

Cole is genuinely more interested in the truth of what is happening in Iraq and the Middle East than any particular political agenda. It just so happens that this bent makes him a liberal ally. Funny how that works…

The best Christmas card we’ve received in a long, long time:

Thanks George!

""Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!""

Upon hearing that Bush’s domestic espionage scandal could lead to impeachment, my son said, “It would be awesome if he was impeached on Christmas. It would be like the world’s Christmas present!”

From the mouths of babes…

Lots to read about Bush’s espionage arrogance. Is it my imagination, or has the weakened president become a much riper target for the press? He does not seem to be getting the free pass that they have since 9/11.

Nice to see the press doing there job. But we live for blogs, so let’s sample two strong ones. First Josh Marshall has been insightful. Here with what a disingenuous thing to say

Wiretaps are conducted around the country every day. The FISA Court alone approves something like a half a dozen a day in highly classified national security or espionage related cases.

The only issue here is why the president decided to go around the normal rules that govern such surveillance, why he chose to make himself above the law.

Another favorite blog, Defense Tech was the first place I read the insight that maybe we are not talking about garden variety wiretaps here. Maybe there is more than meets the eye. New Tech Behind NSA Snoop Case?

That’s all assuming, of course, that the wiretaps in this case are the same as in any other. But maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s something different about this surveillance. It could be in its scope, as Laura suggests. But I’m guessing — and this is just a guess — that the real difference is in the technology of the wiretaps themselves.

Josh is following up this line of inquiry with fishing expedition

I’m not sure it’s data-mining precisely. Perhaps they’re doing searches for certain patterns of words or numbers, perhaps something as simple as a phone number. But unlike ‘traditional’ wiretapping, in which you’re catching the conversations of a relatively small and defined group of people, this may involve listening in on a big slice of the email or phone communications in the country looking for a particular phone number or code or perhaps a reference to a particular name.

From a technological point of view there’s not really much outlandish about this at all. This is just the sort of thing the NSA is in the business of doing overseas. But you can see how this would just be a non-starter for getting a warrant. It is the definition of a fishing expedition.

Let me bring this back to Captain Fishback’s quote, “Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.” Bush as always been an amoral, cynical, gutless puke. This is just more proof.

One look at the 2005 Top Searches make one thing clear. If I want to attract an audience, I’d better make some big changes around here.

Yeah right. Not gonna happen…

Gotta wonder what these people will be saying to the press in the near future. US sets Saddam’s scientists free

Eight former aides to Saddam Hussein - including two women accused of making biological weapons - have been released from US custody in Iraq.

I’m sure the press will focus its attention, if it pays any attention at all, to Dr. Germ. But the other scientists and weapons program experts that have been under detention are more credible and are more likely to make explosive revelations. What this story.

I love Laura Rosen’s War and Piece. She’s all over the wiretap story. Check out here Separation of Powers

And while it seems unprecedented in American life, in democracies governed by the rule of law, this is the typical state of affairs in dictatorships. Dictators, typically, are the law, and they find the individuals like Yoo easily enough to interpret the piece of paper that is known as the law to justify whatever the leader wants, all in the name of national security of course. A permanent state of emergency. Yoo and Rice are not the exception. Their type are typical features of dictatorships, familiar to anyone who has lived in the Soviet Union or Belgrade or East Germany. The technocrat intellectuals that put the intellectual, legal gloss on such shortcircuiting of the law, that make such abuses easier, the enablers.

Helena Cobban posted an excellent analysis of the sorry state of the organized opposition to the war in the US: Chaos in the US antiwar “movement”

At the national level here there are two big antiwar coalitions, which have had a frequently stormy relationship with each other. And now is, sadly enough, one of those times.

These coalitions are United for Peace and Justice, and International ANSWER.

She duly notes both the scary Stalinist character of ANSWER and the ineffectually bloated nature of the lesser known UPJ. Her conclusion sounds right to me:

I have a suggestion. Maybe we should all stop having any faith at all that either of those two existing organizations is capable of coordinating an effective antiwar movement at this time.

Maybe we should ask Tony Benn, the President of the British Stop the War Coalition, and his six very able Vice-Presidents, for permission to form a fraternal branch of their organization here.

Stop the War Coalition-US would adopt the same organizing approach that has proven so effective for the parent group in Britain:

1. A tight focus on ending the war, and
2. Strong organizational cohesiveness– including organizational lean-ness, integrity, and full accountability of all its leaders and officials.

Going this route would have huge advantages. For one thing, we could fold into such a movement the many sterling folks in the US who are not on the political left, who share the growing desire to bring the troops home[…]

When you’re doing coalitional work, it is almost always, imho, important to focus strongly on the goal. Now is surely such a time.

I hadn’t really thought about the disorganization of the war opposition. It’s truly sad that there is such chaos and impotence when in fact public opinion is so clearly in favor of ending the conflict and opposing the war effort.

Here are a couple links to a rumor that’s running round the web: Google to buy Opera? Ars Technica: Google interested in Opera?

As you might expect, Google had no comment. Opera, however, gave a firm ‘no’ to the rumor, saying, ‘Rumors come and go. Google is not buying Opera.’ But the Internet can’t live without a Gbrowser rumor every few months. This one, however, doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

SearcheNgineWatch.com: Rumor Mill: Acquisition Time? Is Google Going To The Opera (Browser)?:

Google is going to acquire Opera. That’s right, the wonderful and powerful Opera browser from Norway (Opera Software ASA to be precise) might become Google’s latest acquisition.

As a long time Opera user, fan and customer, and as a satisfied Google users, I would love to see this happen. I’ve switched to using FireFox most of the time since it flat out gets into more sites than Opera. I almost never have to fire up IE now that I use FireFox, but it was a frequent annoyance with Opera. In most cases it was the fault of the web site for locking Opera out unnecessarily. But for a web surfer it really doesn’t matter if the fault lies with the web site authors or the browser.

So I’ve joined the Mozilla army now, and I’ve laid down the law with my family (who really resisted using Opera because of the need to switch to IE for many of their gaming sites, banking,…) we now use FireFox exclusively.

Except I still prefer Opera. It is just a better browser and a much better UE/UI. They nail MDI much better than FF. Much better keyboard shortcuts. Much, much better handling of images. True page scaling. Much better user style overrides, image load controls, fastforward, periodic page loading…

So if Google wants to scoop them up, open their deep pockets, and put some distribution muscle behind them, I’ll be oh so glad to switch back to Opera. Or GBrowser. Or whatever they become.

Once again, the blogosphere’s attenuated attention span disappoints me. Remember Captain Ian Fishback? No? Well, he’s dropped off the media radar, both the blog media and the “MSM”. As far as we know, he’s probably rotting in some brig, holding out bravely against attempts to break him and make him rat out the Sergeants who joined him in testifying about the way torture has been practiced and sanctioned in Iraq.

We should all take a moment and send him a prayer. Or better yet, send him an email. I just did.

And to be fair, Andrew Sullivan continues to invoke his name in his ardent effort to expose and abolish the use of torture by the U.S. Andrew cites his words in his recent New Republic article, “The Abolition of Torture”. He also cites him in a recent blog post, Wakey Wakey

National Review’s Mark Levin wakes up, stretches, rubs his eyes and asks:

And where is all the evidence that U.S. armed forces and intelligence serves are engaged in torture? Is it widespread? Where is this occurring? McCain hasn’t made the case. We get mostly the same kind of platitudes he was famous for during the campaign-finance reform debate, e.g., the system is “corrupt,” money equals corruption, and so forth. Shouldn’t we stop beating up ourselves over this until such evidence is presented? We seem to be making law here based on hypothetical arguments, or worse — left-wing and enemy propaganda.

I refer Levin to the Schmidt Report, the Taguba Report, the Jones-Fay Report, the Schlesinger Report, the mounds of evidence collected by the International Red Cross, the hundreds of carefully checked newspaper reports documenting torture, abuse, murder, rape, and beatings in every single theater of this war by every branch of the armed services against defenseless military detainees. I refer him to the testimony of West Point graduate Ian Fishback and countless others. I refer him to the many memos constructed by the Bush administration defining and redefining “torture” to the point of meaninglessness. May I offer him a cup of coffee and a warm welcome to reality as well?

Thank you Andrew Sullivan for keeping the anti-torture torch burning. And thank you, Captain Ian Fishback, wherever you are, for your brave patriotism. We are forever in debt to selfless warriors like you.