my del.icio.us

• Metal Levels Found High in Tributary After Spill (Dewan, NYTimes, 1/1/09)
  "An environmental advocacy group’s tests of river water and ash near the site of a huge coal ash spill in East Tennessee showed levels of arsenic, lead, chromium and other metals at 2 to 300 times higher than drinking water standards, the group said Thursday."
• And there lie the bodies (Levy, Haaretz)
  "The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat." Via talking dog.
• Fortune 's Easton misrepresented debate over Employee Free Choice Act (MediaMatters, 12/23/08)
  Fortune magazine Washington editor Nina Easton asserted: "The union-backed Employee Free Choice Act eliminates secret ballots, and declares the union the winner if a majority of employees openly sign a petition." In fact, the EFCA does not eliminate employees' rights to a secret ballot..." Via mick arran. Familiar lies, but worth rebutting.
• An Ex-Detainee of the U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal (Perlez, Bonner, Massood, NYTimes)
  "Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population. “I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period,” Mr. Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews with The New York Times, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore."
• 2008 Weblog Awards Finalists - The 2008 Weblog Awards
  Worth a look; a lot of familiar names from past years, but some new ones too. Don't know why Dilbert is included in the comic strip part, but don't know why there's a comic strip part, for that matter.
• In Iraq, the Day After (Shadid, WaPo, 1/1/09)
  "The war in Iraq is indeed over, at least the conflict as it was understood during its first five years: insurgency, communal cleansing, gangland turf battles and an anarchic, often futile quest to survive. In other words, civil war -- though civil war was always too tidy a term for it. The entropy, for now at least, has run its course. So have many of the forces the United States so dangerously unleashed with its 2003 invasion, turning Iraq into an atomized, fractured land seized by a paroxysm of brutality. In that Iraq, the Americans were the final arbiter and, as a result, deprived anything they left behind of legitimacy."
• Ubuntu Home Page
  Download / Upgrade / Find out more
• Dismantling the Imperial Presidency (Huq, The Nation)
  "Paradoxically, blanket presidential pardons may be the least bad alternative. If prosecutions proceed, they may not be edifying. Admissible evidence will be sparse, given secrecy rules. Officials will protest at being sandbagged after having relied on (flawed) OLC opinions. And there is the danger of a repeat of the Iran/Contra trials, where Oliver North used the dock as a soapbox. Given these risks, a blanket pardon perversely might send the clearest signal that the malaise of the Bush/Cheney era was endemic." This guy works for the Brennan Center! People love paradoxes too much. Blanket pardon would be a clear signal you can get away with anything -- and impeachment would remain the only alternative.
• NYT Endorses Torture Victims’ Lawsuits Against Bush Officials (Eviatar, Wash.Indep)
  "But should torture victims really have to pay a lawyer to take their case to court and wait years for a result? And is the US willing to pay billions of dollars in damages? The better approach might be one suggested to me by Carolyn Patty Blum, a consultant for the International Center for Transitional Justice: have an investigatory commission set up both to investigate what crimes were committed and compensate their victims." Not sure I agree, but these commissions seem like the flavor of the month all around lately, and they're better than nothing, I suppose.
• Is $40,000 the New Going Rate for Presidential Pardons?(Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine)
  "...the pardon “hadn’t been fully executed,” so it could be called back. It had been signed; Bush means that it had not been delivered or accepted. These final steps are in theory necessary to make the pardon effective. [...] There’s more drama to come, but the prologue is already very interesting. And the precedent could prove unnerving to those receiving Bush’s last-minute pardons. It suggests, after all, that Barack Obama has the power simply to revoke the pardons–something that legal scholars considered, up to this point, almost unimaginable."