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The first privacy issue comes from an interesting story earlier this week about how some states are considering banning the release of recorded 911 emergency calls to the public (or -- more to the point -- to the press). This is an interesting First Amendment hair to split, because a reasonable case can be made both ways.
Welcome back to my annual outright theft of The McLaughlin Group's awards categories for the past year in politics. What's that? We're sorry, but out lawyers insist we instead use the phrase "my annual legally-allowable constitutionally-protected parody" instead. So sorry. For those of you who missed it, Part 1 of this column ran last week, on Christmas.
There are big subjects which I should be writing about today. The abortion battle within the Democratic Party, for instance. What Obama is going to announce about our troop commitment in Afghanistan. And, believe it or not, David Hasselhoff's contribution to freedom.
I've always been confused why the media goes berserk about rating a president's "first 100 days," but then just stops counting after the first milestone. This, to a statistician, would be known as a "zero dimensional data array" -- one data point, to be exact. If you don't re-test the sample on a regular schedule, how are you supposed to compare it to anything?
Senator Dianne Feinstein finally said what I've been waiting for someone to say about the whole "reverse racism" charge now being levied by Republicans against President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court pick, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. From this weekend's Face The Nation, Feinstein summed the entire controversy up in her first response to moderator Bob [...]
Debates about national security always fascinate me, because almost without exception nobody bothers to define the term itself. This, to me, is a key feature of any debate about national security versus the people's right to know what their government is doing in their name -- such as the one currently raging over whether to publicly release thousands of photographs of detainee abuse. But the definition of "national security" is always conspicuous in its absence in the debate. Which allows the government to get away with using two definitions of the term interchangeably, when only one should be legally allowed.
I admit, I am getting the jump on the rest of the media here, by writing my "First 100 Days" article six days early (some would say five days early, but they would be wrong). I have jumped this particular gun already, I should point out, having already written one article (after Obama's first week in office) entitled "Obama's First 168 Hours." So today we are going to pre-empt the usual Friday Talking Points article this week with a special edition on President Obama's "First 100 Days," since everyone will be talking about it starting this weekend.
What a strange set of sentences that is to begin an article about the twenty-first century world we live in. But pirates are attacking ships with regularity off the coast of Somalia. This has been going on for years, but Americans just realized it is happening (because an American ship was just attacked). And, while the two are not connected (and I am not advocating for their connection, sorry for the slightly-misleading headline), people are finally talking about torture after President Obama released the Bush torture memos to the public. We'll get to the Bush torture memos in a bit, but I'd like to begin with a proposed solution to the pirate problem first.
American Violet is not a "horror movie." It has no monsters, zombies, or mass murderers in it. Just people. But the movie's powerful message on the role racism plays in the Drug War will likely horrify you just the same. So while American Violet is about as far from the "horror" genre in moviemaking as you can get, audiences may indeed be horrified (or perhaps outraged) at the injustice displayed by one district attorney in Texas.
President Obama is taking your questions now, and will answer them tomorrow. In a move to make Obama more accessible and answerable to the public, the White House web site is soliciting questions from the public for Obama to answer on their new "Open For Questions" page. So, given the opportunity, what question would you ask the president? Personally, I would choose: "Will drug policy be included in your new science-based approach to government, or will you let politics continue to trump science in this arena?" Because there have been two specific news items in the past few weeks, and while they are almost completely unrelated, they both come from the "science/politics" debate on drugs. The first is the "morning after" pill, and the second is medical marijuana.