In Saudia Arabia, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape.” A higher court raised that to 200 lashes after her attorney said the one to five year sentences given the six rapists were too lenient.

Forced, that is, by my alternator going on the fritz. Plans for a ride into work having fallen through, I decided to resort to Okaloosa Transit. It’s not my first time having to do so, and it’s a lot cheaper than renting a car for the day; on the downside, the lag time when I transfer between bus routes has sometimes left me sitting around too long if I arrive at the transition point right after one bus has left.
No such problem today though, perhaps because I left early enough that all the buses were just starting out. Took the WAVE service from near my home over to Uptown Station where I found the transit shuttle to Okaloosa Island gearing up to leave. When I arrived, I waited a few minutes before the shuttle that took me into Destin showed up. Total running time, 1 hour between FWB and Destin, plus 15 minutes for the WAVE trip. Satisfactory.
Some of the riders with me were obviously regulars, some even having paid for monthly passes. Others, like me, were temporarily stranded by lack of other transportation. A lot of them were quite talkative, even with strangers. One or two had the look I associate with the homeless (grungy, with apparently all their possessions wrapped up in a plastic bag) and one smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in some time.
I’m glad the service is available, but I’m even gladder to have my car back and running.

Quotes on hope:

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”—Vaclav Havel

“Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”—St. Augustine

“Hope is that cuddly, fuzzy thing you take to your bosom, and the next thing you know, its sharp teeth are in your throat, its sharp claws are raking your belly, and your guts are lying in a steaming heap on the floor.”—Dori Koogler

“Despair looks for excuses not to act and always finds them. Hope, it’s opposite, always chooses to act. It’s in for good and whole hog. Even if the odds seem insurmountable and the resources inadequate. If all it has is five loaves and two small fish, or five smooth stones, or a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, it will use whatever it’s got”.—Fred Clark.

Most of you have probably heard by now about the phony press conference FEMA held recently on the California wildfires: After giving reporters only 15 minutes notification, FEMA then found—surprise!—that none had shown up, so it filled the press conference with it’s own staffers, asking questions as if they were reporters.
Once it came out, John Philbin, the PR guy responsible, resigned, which is good, but his recent interview with CBS news takes the cake for lying with a straight face.
According to Philbin, FEMA hadn’t intended to stage a phony conference, but Harvey Johnson, the FEMA official fielding the questions, didn’t realize it was his own staff asking them — even though Johnson called on them by name during the “conference.”
Philbin also says he “should have intervened” when the staff began asking questions, but doesn’t explain why he was one of the people asking questions.
So let’s see … Johnson held a press conference; a group of staffers filed in and sat in the press seats by sheer coincidence; Johnson, incapable of recognizing the people he works with on a daily basis, reacted to them as real reporters; and even though Philbin realized what had happened, he was incapable of keeping himself from joining in with more fake questions. And the whole thing was completely unintentional.
Uh-huh.

One of Bush supporters’ recurring rationalizations for waterboarding and other forms of torture is the “ticking bomb” hypothetical where we have an imminent terrorist attack and only one way to stop it: Force the information out of the diabolical terrorist Jack Bauer (or whoever) just captured.
Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens, for instance, wrote recently that the issue with torture should be whether it’s effective, not over the ethics, especially considering “hypothetical cases where the alternative to waterboarding is terrorist attacks resulting in mass casualties among innocent civilians.”
When pro-torture people use this line of argument, everyone should remember that even if you agree, it has nothing to do with the torture practices in the global war on terror.
For all the administration’s exaggerated claims about its successes, they’ve never claimed that what’s happened in Abu Ghraib, in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas or the foreign torture chambers we’ve shipped prisoners to has been justified by stopping an imminent terrorist attack. They’ve claimed “harsh interrogation” produces valuable information (though of course it’s all classified so they can’t actually prove it), but that’s as far as it goes.
On the contrary, reports and first-hand accounts of Abu Ghraib show the standard use of torture was simply to “get information.” Not about imminent attacks. Not about ticking bombs, just to squeeze whatever people know out of them, if they knew anything.
And sometimes they didn’t, because suspected terrorists or people who were mistaken for terrorists got caught up in sweeps and interrogations too, and received the same treatment. As one contractor who worked at Abu Ghraib said, a common response to “I don’t know anything, you’ve got the wrong man!” was to work harder to make the man confess the “truth.”
I could go on about how torture (according to a wide variety of security professionals) isn’t more effective than persuasion at producing intel, and how humiliating it is that the leader of our country now champions a practice we used to condemn (while continuing to insist that no, of course we aren’t torturing anyone), but I need to get back to work.

An AP article today about Rep. Ron Paul tying a fund-raising drive for his presidential campaign to Guy Fawkes Day (aka Nov. 5) makes me want to shake my head at people’s obliviousness to history.
I’m not accusing Paul of wanting to emulate Fakwes, who was part of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament with James I inside. I accept his spokesperson’s comment that Paul “wants to demolish things like the Department of Education, but we can do that very peacefully.”
Even so, it bugs me to see anyone hold Fawkes up as a symbol of anti-government, revolutionary goals, as the film V for Vendetta did (some of Paul’s supporters used clips of the film on YouTube as a fundraising promotion). Guido Fawkes wasn’t against government, just against the one England had at the time. He worked for a conspiracy led by various Catholic nobles, such as Robin Catesby (Fawkes, though he’s the only name most people now remember, was only a low-ranking field agent) that plotted to kill King James, kidnap his son and use control of the boy to replace the Church of England with a Catholic monarchy. That makes him closer to religious terrorists such as al-Qaida or Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph than to libertarianism.
Like I said, I don’t think that reflects on Paul’s views, but it still makes me wince.
For more information about the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser’s “Faith and Treason” makes excellent reading.

Reading the Washington Post’s “left of boom” series on IEDs (the title refers to taking out bombmakers before they plant the bombs), I was impressed to learn that one of the best tools for spotting them is the “Mark 1 Human Eyeball”—that is, a trained soldier can spot 50 percent of IEDs, better than any machine has done in the field.
Of course, that’s 50 percent going unspotted, so the work in electronic detection, jamming and hunting down bombmakers is still vital. Even after the troops come home, this will obviously not be the last time we confront IEDs, since their success undoubtedly guarantees they’ll be employed against us in other wars in other places.
Still, 50 percent by the human eye alone is pretty darn amazing.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/ has an excellent breakdown of why they’re striking (the newest post just now, scroll down if it’s not).

While I’ll miss my shows if the strike runs long, my sympathy is, unsurprisingly, with the writers. Kfmonkey (screenwriter John Rogers) makes a good case that fairness is on their side too.

“Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control.”—Robert Kennedy.

Sometimes I am, reluctantly, impressed by the ability of the Bush administration.
In the current confirmation hearings for proposed attorney general Michael Mukasey, Mukasey has been asked a straight question: Is waterboarding torture? You know, is it torture to force water into someone’s lungs to make them feel like they’re drowning.
(And in case you’re wondering, the answer is yes. That’s why waterboarding has been used by torturers and oppressors for centuries).
Mukasey’s response, backed up by the president: He doesn’t know. Oh, it sounds horrible, but but he can’t offer a legal opinion because he doesn’t know exactly what the CIA is doing with waterboarding, or under what circumstances, so he can’t say whether their operations are legal or not.
So what’s the problem? As the Obsidian Wings blog has pointed out, all Mukasey has to do is define what he means by waterboarding and say whether he believes that constitutes torture. Then, if he becomes AG, he can take a look at the CIA programs and decide if they meet that definition.
Of course, that might make it harder for Bush to insist that none of the CIA’s interrogation techniques violate the law. Which might actually lead to restrictions on the use of torture by the United States. Which I think would be a good thing, but the president clearly disagrees.
If Mukasey can’t figure out whether waterboarding is torture or not, he shouldn’t be confirmed.