Kenya Devolves

Unfortunately, it looks like the situation in Kenya is not getting better. A second opposition leader was killed and even if this is true:
According to police officials and witnesses, Mr. Too, 39, spent the morning with Eunice Chepkwony, a policewoman who was dating another police officer, Andrew Moache. Mr. Too and Ms. Chepkwony were driving [...]

More Mercury Pics

Here are a couple more pictures that Messenger took of Mercury (the first is in some color, the second is of the Caloris basin, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system):

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
3/12/2009 Update: the second picture’s link was broken and I fixed it.

More Mukasey

Mukasey is an idiot when it comes to waterboarding. Go look at TPM for a bunch of bits of his testimony, I especially like the one with Whitehouse:
WHITEHOUSE: Has that been done?
Has there been a thorough, independent analysis, under your administration, of whether or not any national of the United States is potentially in violation [...]

Mukasey: I Can’t Say Whether Flaying Someone Is Torture

AG Mukasey must be better than Gonzalez was, but this is really stupid:
“Given that waterboarding is not part of the current program and may never be added to the current program, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to pass definitive judgment on the technique’s legality,” the attorney general said, speaking in the [...]

Who’s Left?

Hmm, both Giuliani and Edwards are now probably out–as are Dodd, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich, Fred Thompson, Hunter, and Tancredo. We’re left with:
Democrats: Clinton, Obama, (Gravel -I haven’t officially heard he’s out, not that it matters);
Republicans: McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Paul.
It looks to be a two person race for both parties–this is obvious for the Democrats; for [...]

Arlo Guthrie and Ron Paul

My respect for Arlo Guthrie has gone down, as he has now endorsed Ron Paul. It doesn’t mean I will now not like his music, I can and do separate the art and the artist, but it does mean I will respect him less as a person. I’m not sure Woody would like it, since [...]

Signing Statements

In his state of the union, Bush said he wanted to work in a bipartisan way. It didn’t take him long to drop that, as he issued four signing statements to a bill Monday. If he wanted to act in a bipartisan way, he would have talked to the Congress before the bill was passed [...]

New World Order

Hmm, Kevin Drum links to this piece by Parag Khanna which has some interesting bits. I haven’t finished it yet, but this by KD made me think:
And on an offbeat note, I’m amused to see that the phrase “third world” has now lost its original meaning so completely that Khanna uses “second world” to refer to [...]

Bipartisan

This ariticle starts from the premise that Bush wanted to be a bipartisan President, but 9/11 and Iraq changed him:
In calling last night for a bipartisan compromise on securing Medicare and Social Security, an international pact to reduce greenhouse gases, and greater action to diminish national dependence on foreign oil, Bush sought to exercise precisely the [...]

Israel and Gaza

The more I think about it, the more the idea in this article makes sense (I looked at it here). The claim made in this article in the NY Times:
When Hamas blew large holes in Gaza’s border with Egypt, allowing thousands of Palestinians a chance to stock up on medicines, food and consumer goods, it [...]

Meat and the Environment

Hmm, this article in the NY Times shows that the old vegetarian screed against meat might have gone mainstream. Here are the main points about meat (all from the article):

an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, [...]

Selling Water in CA

This is just weird:
With water becoming increasingly precious in California, a rising number of farmers figure they can make more money by selling their water than by actually growing something.
Because farmers get their water at subsidized rates, some of them see financial opportunity this year in selling their allotments to Los Angeles and other desperately [...]

New Orleans Housing

Let’s see, a lot of the housing in New Orleans for the lower and middle classes were torn down:
Thousands of blue-collar workers like Washington who never lived in publicly subsidized housing increasingly have no place to live in New Orleans. The planned demolition of 4,500 publicly subsidized apartments is less significant to the future, policy [...]

Just Let Them Die

Wow this (via Mark Kleiman) is amazing in its callousness:
Every year, overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS, hepatitis or homicide.
And the number of overdoses has gone up dramatically over the past decade.
But now, public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are [...]

Resegregation

Here’s one of the reasons that affirmative action in some form is needed:
About one-sixth of black students and one-ninth of Latino students attend what Mr. Orfield calls “apartheid schools,” at least 99 percent minority. In big cities, black and Latino students are nearly twice as likely to attend such schools. Some two-thirds of black and [...]

Pakistan and Kenya

Things had been looking up in both countries (the two main rivals in Kenya had met and Pakistan had said it would allow unrestricted access for voting monitors), but there’s been a bit of backsliding:

violence has once again increased in Kenya and both sides are again taking a hard line.

Pakistan now says that it will not [...]

Gaza and Egypt

I was curious about the toppling of the walls on the border of Gaza and Egypt. Israel is trying to blockade Gaza to punish Hamas for the rockets launched into Israel and yet there has not been much of an outcry against this (and no action by the Israeli military). I think this article gives much [...]

Private Schools

The idea that Harvard now has an endowment of $34 billion(and 76 schools have endowments over $1 billion) and Phillips Exeter School has an endowment of $1 billion (and this is behind Kamehameha at $9 billion and Milton Hershey School at $7.8 billion) really bother me. It’s part of the splitting of the education of [...]

Bush: It’s Not a Treaty Because I Say It’s Not

The Bush administration has been working up an agreement with Iraq to keep US troops there past the end of the year. Despite the fact that the agreement talks about security guarantees, which have never been made without a treaty:
 After World War II, for example – when the United States gave security commitments to Japan, [...]

Huckabee, Wolfowitz, and Contractors

Huckabee still thinks that there might have been WMDs in Iraq and they might have been sent to Jordan? And he is one of the frontrunners for the Republicans? I guess they don’t care much about foreign affairs.
Let’s see Wolfowitz was almost completely wrong about Iraq, was disliked and forced out of the World Bank [...]