Bush Courts Another Souter

Words I can't recall saying before: I agree with Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer. In John Roberts, President Bush has nominated another David Souter, a jurist without a public record that would justify the confidence Republicans are expressing in his approach to the Constitution.

Perhaps he'll prove to be a reliable member of the Scalia-Thomas bloc, but evangelical conservatives who returned Bush to the White House for a full assault on Roe v. Wade ought to be wondering why the president snuck another stealth candidate forward. The GOP's in solid control of Congress largely because of religious voters who care about no issue more than the criminalization of abortion. Roberts could perch atop the Constitution for 30 years. How much of a governing majority does a pro-life Republican president need before he'll nominate an explicitly anti-Roe jurist to the court?

My cynical suspicion is that Bush wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rage-inducing for the GOP base. A Roe overturn would provoke a strong backlash -- a majority of the country is pro-choice, according to recent polls. A return to back-alley abortions turns a significant number of those people into strong single-issue voters while giving the GOP's most loyal voters one less reason to go to the polls.

Politics · 2005/07/28 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Finding Latoyia Figueroa

Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old woman five months' pregnant with her second child, disappeared in Philadelphia July 18. She has a seven-year-old daughter and never missed a shift at the restaurant where she worked, so her loved ones are fearing the worst.

The Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley has offered a $10,000 reward for information about her whereabouts.

Richard Blair, a Philly blogger, is trying to get her case on the same television news programs that have covered Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, and the Runaway Bride. He's already managed to attract the attention of CNN.Com, based on coverage Figueroa has received on blogs, and has been invited by several networks to talk about the blog angle:

Latoyia's story has moved from CNN to MSNBC and Fox this evening. So it's getting some exposure. Still nothing on Nancy Grace. I've been answering email and on the phone all evening, so I apologize in advance for not having a whole lot more to offer today. Just to give you an idea, I've turned down on-air interview requests now from all "big three" cable news nets, as well as ABC's Good Morning America. This isn't about how we collectively pushed Latoyia's story out there (yet, anyway) -- it's about finding a missing young pregnant woman who needs to be found.

Figueroa's an unlikely subject for round-the-clock treatment, for reasons you might have surmised. Wrong color, wrong class, wrong background. Sadly, she lost her own mother at age 2 to a violent death.

Blair's desire to make the broadcast media address the substance of this story, rather than covering the novelty of the blogosphere's outrage-motivated adoption of a missing person, may greatly limit the exposure he could have gotten for her disappearance.

Speaking from personal experience, there's an extremely short window of time in which the national media cares about a no-name blogger's unusual media hack. Thursday may be the last day he gets any invites; no one outside of the fruit fly family has a shorter attention span than TV news producers.

2005/07/28 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Catching Up with the Five of Hearts

I've begun reading How America Lost Iraq, a book by Aaron Glantz, a war correspondent for the liberal Pacifica radio network.

Glantz's premise is that the Iraqi people were extremely receptive to the U.S. after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but their support has been lost because of the imprisonment of innocent people, an inability to restore basic services like water and electricity, and widespread anarchy.

The first chapter takes satisfaction in the downfall of Huda Amash, a Saddam loyalist who was the five of hearts on the U.S. most-wanted card deck and the highest ranking woman in Iraq. She was arrested in Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in custody, where she's reportedly suffering from breast cancer.

One of Glantz's friends, a documentary filmmaker, described how she ran a youth conference he was permitted to attend:

"Under her guidance," James [Longley] explained, "the conference was turned into a series of Stalinist rallies for the Great Leader. Attendance was mandatory. In the great hall of the convention palace children's choirs competed with dancing Japanese peace activists while odes to Saddam were screamed out in fake spontaneous outbursts from the crowd. A large number of doves were released in the hall and flew madly around the edges of the room, searching frantically for a way out. I sympathized with them entirely."

Today's Washington Post includes a commentary from a childhood friend of Amash, who grew up in D.C., asking for her release.

Her friend reveals an unusual aspect of Amash's background -- she was in the inner circle of the man who ordered her father's death:

The family soon returned to Iraq, and we lost all contact with them. Maj. Ammash's career prospered; he rose to be defense minister. In 1981, however, Saddam Hussein convened a meeting of party leaders and tearfully read out the names of those of his old comrades who were to be led from the hall and shot on the spot. Salih Madhi Ammash was among them.

Journalism · 2005/07/27 · 1 COMMENT · Link

To get around Bayesian filters, some spammers have resorted to ASCII art, spelling out words with characters and really small text.

I've been online long enough to remember when people used to create ASCII babes you had to print to view. Back in the late '80s, whenever I retrieved a printout from the University of North Texas computer science lab, there were always a bunch of suggestive or even explicit ASCII trollops waiting to be picked up.

It wasn't easy for the object of your affection to be vulnerable to smudging.

North Texas · 2005/07/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

In the comments to a Workbench entry on an alleged credit card theft, I've been debating Chad Irby on whether customers were notified properly once theft of their card information was suspected.

After an exchange in which both of us seemed to become less informed over time, I decided to do something unbloglike. I contacted the site's publisher to ask when they notified customers.

ProtestWarrior confirmed that the possible theft was discovered in February, but customers were not told until a July 5 web posting on the site.

Politics · 2005/07/23 · Comment · Link

With the impending release of Atom 1.0, its creators are taking the unusual step of disowning version 0.3, which has been widely implemented by Google, Six Apart, and other developers. Sam Ruby will revise the Feed Validator to reject all 0.3 feeds with an error message later this year, even if they fully followed its spec.

Mark Pilgrim on the move:

Atom 0.3 was just some guys (and gals) dicking around on a wiki.

Mark Pilgrim during the release of version 0.3:

Atom 0.3 is out. Mark Nottingham wrote the 0.3 spec. I wrote a Movable Type template. Rael Dornfest wrote a Blosxom plugin. I am now publishing a live 0.3 feed with both excerpts and full content. ... I've updated the Feed Validator to validate Atom 0.3 feeds. ... When developers update their applications to support Atom 0.3, they should support Atom autodiscovery too.

2005/07/21 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Louisiana's Road to Nowhere

Despite its name, Interstate 49 runs entirely within Louisiana, connecting the cities of Lafayette and Shreveport. The highway will link New Orleans and Kansas City, if existing plans are carried out.

I appreciate the existence of this road on the 1,104-mile jaunt between Florida and Dallas, because it makes possible a jump from I-10 to I-20 while still making good time westward. But it could be the most featureless interstate I've ever driven.

There's nothing to recommend this drive. No cities or stops of interest, aside from a Semolina restaurant in Alexandria I loved until a suspect shrimp dish made me decree a no-seafood policy on road trips. No Kodak moments. No nice hotels. No traffic.

The lack of traffic's a plus, of course, but it raises the question of how such a little-needed highway got built. I'd love to find out which Louisiana politician had enough juice in Washington to get I-49 funded in the '60s and '70s.

I think I-49 induced boredom motivated another driver to road rage. Without provocation, he intentionally kept himself in my blind spot for a half hour, whether I was driving 65 mph or 85 mph. (Seemed like a dumb thing to do in a car with federal license plates that identified his agency and vehicle.)

The only sizeable city is Alexandria, but the highway deftly avoids any of its picturesque or historic areas. The last two times I've stopped, I didn't find anything but miles of grubby commercial strip malls and uninviting hotels on MacArthur Drive, so I jumped back on I-49 and kept going.

2005/07/21 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries