Live from the Nuke Free Zone

The 30 year guerilla war in Aceh province, Indonesia is finally over.
May there be more random outbreaks of peace in the coming year.

The recent Iraqi election was marred by claims of fraud, and worse, several Sunni candidates were barred from office. It’s safe to say that the Sunni goodwill gained from the election is gone. For more reading, Georgia10@DKos has an overview of the situation.

US News and World Report says that the FBI and Department of Energy have been taking radiation samples at mosques and Muslim-owned businesses and homes in the D.C. area and other major cities. This doesn’t seem as egregious as what Bush did to go around FISA, which was established as fast-track for warrants in the […]

You might have heard that Bush turned around and pledged to support a bill containing an anti-torture amendment from Senator John McCain even though Bush had earlier promised to veto any bill containing the amendment. Then we hear this: McCain made a deal
with Bush to exempt the CIA from liability for committing torture (see also […]

Under the fold, a whole bunch of things that I have been in the
news lately that I don’t have a proper writeup for. I’m sure I missed
more than I’ve been able to keep track of.

There are no official results from last week’s Iraqi national election yet, but it looks like there has been significant Sunni participation this time, so that’s a good sign. When people feel like they have a stake in the government, it is harder to see it as the enemy, and when the Sunnis boycotted or […]

A well-funded secret organization
has been tapping the phones of thousands of selected American citizens,
listening in on up to five hundred calls at any one time. Well, now that we know about it we’ll
just sic the government on them and they’ll be gone in a snap, right?
What a pisser to find out it is our government.

And once again in the category of “Fun Blank Spots in the Law,” we turn to a case from Texas. Ah, Texas. Home of good folks that love barbeque, country music, and executing anybody on any excuse they can grab. In today’s case, we have a missed filing deadline for a prisoner […]

The average American college graduate’s literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation’s college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw […]

As another in the occasional series from this ‘Zone author on Texas politics, we have a locally interesting article on the changing makeup of the Texas House. The motivation of the article is that quite a few legislators are retiring this year, but hung on this like Christmas tree decorations are a huge array […]