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a citizen’s journal by Thomas Nephew

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    • No Way. No How. No Brennan. (Sullivan, Atlantic/DailyDish)
      "We haven't fought for decency and reform and a return to American values for so long to be turned back now. We didn't work our butts off to elect Obama only to get Bush another four years at CIA. If Brennan emerges as the pick, those of us against the continuation of war crimes and the prosecution of war criminals will have to oppose him strenuously in the nomination process. We will, in fact, have to go to war with Obama before he even takes office. And if Obama doubts our seriousness, I have three words for him. Yes we can."
    • Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt (Bain, BBCNews)
      Nicely laid out philosophical chestnuts. I liked the quote at the end: "…the end of our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time." -- TS Eliot
    • Torturing Democracy (PBS)
      "Impatience with the rule of law – and the firm conviction that the commander in chief had the authority to ignore it – would become a hallmark of the war on terror." PBS documentary on how far we've fallen. Let's not let the John Brennans keep us from getting back up. (Transcript at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/documents/td_transcript.pdf.)
    • Obama and privacy: some early disquieting signs (Pincus, Liminal States)
      Catalist voter info may be shared with likeminded groups; vetting process uses ChoicePoint -- private company end run on what government can't do as easily or at all itself.
    • Obama And The Presidency (60 Minutes, video, CBSNews.com)
      Looking at "how do we sequence [economy, health care, energy] in a way that we can actually get them through Congress."
    • The Washington Post drinks Dick Cheney's Kool-Aid (Noah, Slate)
      No, no, no, no, no, no, no: "Some, like the jobs that will turn over in the vice president's office, are not included because the office technically is not part of either the executive branch or the legislative branch."
    • Obama Team Faces Major Task in Justice Dept. Overhaul (Johnson, WaPo)
      "At a conference in Washington this week, former department criminal division chief Robert S. Litt asked that the new administration avoid fighting old battles that could be perceived as vindictive, such as seeking to prosecute government officials involved in decisions about interrogation and the gathering of domestic intelligence. ... "It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," Litt said. "It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up."" What an idiot. Bipartisanship isn't a good in itself, it's a means to an end -- and its price should never be sweeping war crimes and crimes against the rights of Americans under the table. Shame on Robert Litt.
    • Post-partisan harmony vs. the rule of law (Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com)
      "[Former Clinton official Robert Litt's] belief is that Bush officials should be protected from DOJ proceedings even if they committed crimes. And his reason for that is as petty and vapid as it is corrupt: namely, it is more important to have post-partisan harmony in our political class than it is to hold Presidents and other high officials accountable when they break the law." Yes, that is apparently the consensus, Obama shouldn't be a part of it -- but I'm afraid he will.
    • Vast Obama network becomes a political football (Wallsten, Hamburger, LAT)
      "Now, as Obama turns from campaigning to governing, his advisors are struggling to harness this potent web of supporters to help him move his agenda over the next four years."
    • How to End the Recession (Pollin, The Nation)
      "[A green public-investment stimulus ] would generate many more jobs--eighteen per $1 million in spending--than would programs to increase spending on the military and the oil industry... [which] generate only about 7.5 jobs for every $1 million spent.
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About

Who the heck is Thomas Nephew?

I was born in 1958 in Schweinfurt, Germany. My mother is German, and I grew up speaking German — first just a few words, then somewhat more fluently following a summer’s worth of at-home schooling, followed by a trip to see my relatives in “Franken,” in North Bavaria. All of this by way of explaining the frequent entries about Germany. For the most part, I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; I’ve also lived in Jülich and Tübingen, Germany, St. Louis, MO, Davis and Oakland in California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. My home is now Takoma Park, MD.

I have a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Before that, I studied biology at Washington University in St. Louis and the Universität Tübingen (year abroad program), and then genetics at U.C. Davis. I got “sidetracked” while at U.C. Davis, and worked for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign there and then later in Oakland, California. Following that I worked at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley.

I’m married to the lovely and talented Cricket Dadian, and we have a beautiful girl named Madeleine (Maddie).

What rules are there about commenting?

Just be polite with eachother, and to some extent with me. I reserve the right to take action about a comment if I think it is too impolite or offensive, or for any other reason I see fit, particularly including

1) being off-topic (including but not limited to commercial spam),
2) way too long, or
3) from an IP source known or reasonably suspected to be, um, truth- or candor-challenged.

When necessary, I will either…

1) delete the comment,
2) block the IP address of the commenter,
3) or both.

I don’t mean to cut off or chill normal discussion, which can get heated now and then. Also, I’ll hold comments about me to a lower standard than comments about other readers. This is mainly about foul language, racist language, or sexist language. All are out of bounds.

Hey– what happened to my comments from a while back?

I messed up at one point and lost comments from my old commenting service, BlogBack Plus, which went out of service a short while later. I had backed up a bunch of the old Blogback comments, and hope to add them to the archived Haloscan comments at some point and hook that all up again. But some (roughly from early June 2005-September 2005) are gone for good. I’m sorry.

E-mail

I welcome e-mail correspondence; you can e-mail me at thomasn528 at yahoo dot com. You’ll need to replace the ” at ” and ” dot ” with “@” and “.” (Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m hoping this keeps spammers’ computers from getting my e-mail address by hunting through my web site.)

You can use HTML or text format e-mail, I don’t care. I will try to answer all serious e-mail, or explain why I can’t do so on the blog.

When your correspondence is about a blog post or an issue you’d like to see discussed, please indicate whether you mind being quoted, and if not under what name (true, pseudonym, anonymous) you’d prefer to be quoted.

However, abusive e-mails I suspect to be responses to posts in the “newsrack” blog or to the blog in general will be published at my discretion, with your name attached. I’ll also take other steps as warranted.

What are your blog policies? Or do you just do whatever you want?

I sometimes go back and tinker with my posts after I publish them to the web. I usually add “EDIT:” or “UPDATE:” comments within the post when I do so, so people returning to the post (especially via a link to the post established before the edit) have an explanation for the change.

If I link to a site, that does not imply I approve of the site or any specific opinions expressed there.

Yes, I do pretty much whatever I want.

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