A federal judge has ordered an immediate halt to the President’s NSA spying program. TPM Muckraker has some excerpts from the judge’s decision :

“The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent power” must derive from that Constitution.”

Upon hearing this decision, President Bush, whose great-grandfather was a close adviser to President Hoover, grandfather was a Senator, and father was President, said “I’m sorry, were you trying to tell me something?”

A couple of years ago, the idea of impeaching George W. Bush worried me. My fear was that two impeached presidents in a row would weaken our constitution by making impeachment a de facto partisan tool. Needless to say, I don’t feel that way anymore. This interview with the guy who broke the Abu Ghraib abuse story is a good example of why :

The other thing was, there were other government agencies who would come into the prison and handle prisoners. I can’t say which agencies, but you can probably guess. Sometimes we didn’t know exactly who they were. We’d get a call at like three in the morning from the battalion commander, saying, “You have a bird coming in. You need to take prisoner such and such from cell whatever to the landing zone in fifteen minutes.” So I’d put my gear on, cuff the prisoner, bag him, go to the LZ, wait for the helicopter to land, and then hand the prisoner off to the guys inside. I didn’t know who they were. Didn’t ask. When they tell you not to ask any questions, you don’t ask questions. They might bring the prisoner back in a few hours, or the next morning, or two days later. You didn’t ask. Other times, they would bring a new prisoner into the compound. You didn’t know who they were, or who the prisoner was, or what he had done, or what they were going to do to him. You just handed over the cellblock. One night, this Black Hawk landed at about 4 a.m., and a couple guys came in with a prisoner and took him to tier 1, put sheets up so that nobody could see, and spent the rest of the night in there. They told us to stay away, so we did. Then a couple hours later, they came back out. They were like, “The prisoner is dead.” They asked for ice to pack him, and then they said, “You guys clean this up. We weren’t here. Have a good day.” Got back on the bird and took off, left the dead body right there. Those guys can come in and kill a guy, and there’s nothing you can do. There’s no record of them. They were never there. They don’t exist.

The way I see it now, we owe it to our nation to impeach a man who oversees criminality like this. It’s no longer just about removing a dangerous person from office, but sending a message to future presidents. If George W. Bush is allowed to finish his term without being punished for the crimes he’s involved with, I think it will set a precedent that will eventually destroy this country.

Decibel Magazine has a fantastic article about openly gay metalheads that goes far beyond the standard “Did you know Rob Halford was gay?” trivia that seems to be the beginning and ending of most discussions of heavy metal’s attitude towards homosexuality. (via MeFi)

With mohawked black frontman Doug Pinnick and music that combined metal, progressive rock and power-pop, King’s X was something of a tough sell for Metal Blade Records. Due to the perspective of Pinnick’s lyrics, the band soon found itself being aggressively marketed as a Christian band. Then Pinnick came out, throwing everyone into further confusion.

“I just felt like a hypocrite hiding it, especially in the Christian music scene,” Pinnick says. “We never professed to be a Christian band and never wanted to become associated with ignorance and intolerance. It was something that I just needed to do no matter what the consequences were. The only thing [Metal Blade] said was that they wished I’d have told them first before I did it. Ty and Jerry said that they were glad it happened, but we definitely lost a few sales there.” Indeed, Christian bookstores returned their King’s X titles en masse to the label. “I’ve said many controversial things in the media, especially about my dissatisfaction with Christian media and becoming agnostic. They never questioned this, but when I came out, they freaked.”

Sad to think that “Christian” bookstores have a higher tolerance for questioning the very existence of their god then they do for homosexuality, but there ya go.

The Show with Ze Frank is an acquired taste, but you should really watch this episode. Since the news is currently obsessed with a lady who flipped out on a flight, it would be nice to see a little insight into what terrorism is and why it works.

UPDATE : Tuesday’s episode is equally brilliant. What til you hear what happens when Joe Lieberman steps up to the plate.

It’s funny how most people weren’t willing to admit that Mel Gibson was a raving anti-semite until he actually shot his mouth off about Jews. Nevermind the fact that he embraced an anti-semitic tradition (the passion play), has used the same coded language as holocaust deniers (like his father), and that every bit of artistic license he took with The Passion was to the detriment of the Jewish characters. Until Mel came out and said how much he hates Jews, everyone was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Now the same pathetic charade is happening with Virginia Senator George Allen. It seems pretty clear to me that a man who hangs a confederate flag in his office, a noose from a tree, and tried to incite a race riot is a racist, but the willfully ignorant seem to buy the explanations that these were an expression of southern pride, part of a “Western memorabilia collection”, and some youthful hijinks. Now that Allen has used the word “macaca” to refer to someone with dark skin, will people finally recognize how racist this guy is? Despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any positive way to spin this incident, but I’d be willing to guess that the press will continue to look the other way, lest they be charged with bias.

With the Israel/Lebanon war in a temporary cease-fire, now’s a good time to reflect on the root causes of the hatred that seems to be swallowing up the entire world. From my cushy vantage point, there seem to be two main factors at play.

The first is that petty religious differences are the catalyst for some of the most deep-seated rage on Earth. Religious fundamentalists of every stripe seem intent on rebuilding the world to match their interpretation of a book that’s hundreds of years old, while punishing anyone who doesn’t fit their criteria for being a godly person.

The second factor in the tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere is that nothing can unite a group of people quite like having a common enemy. Your lifestyle is under attack by heathens of some sort and the key to salvation and/or security is through the leadership of some religious/political leader.

Which leads me to my plan for permanent world peace. If the entire world needs a common enemy, then I’ll volunteer to be it. After seeing the religious devotion/furor that errupted with The Passion, my plan is to make a movie about Abraham :

In the Torah and the Qur’an, Abraham is described as a patriarch blessed by God (the Jewish people called him “Father Abraham”), and promised great things. Jews and Christians consider him father of the people of Israel through his son Isaac; Muslims regard him as the father of the Arabs through his son Ishmael. In Christian belief, Abraham is a model of faith, and his intention to obey God by offering up Isaac is seen as a foreshadowing of God’s offering of his son, Jesus. In Islam, Abraham obeyed God by offering up Ishmael and is considered to be one of the most important prophets sent by God.

In my movie, Abraham is Rotting in Hell, Abraham is a drug-addicted pedophile who turns tricks for heroin. Comic relief comes in the form of Abe’s mentally-challenged conjoined twins Isaac and Ishmael, who are eventually killed when they jump off a cliff while trying to fly. Indifferent to his sons deaths, Abraham smokes some crack and robs a liquor store. Also, it’s a musical.

That movie should piss off just about everyone in the world, but at least they’ll be pissed off together for the same reason.

Steve and Stephen tackle the Iraq war :

I wish they’d put more of this Daily Show stuff on DVD. I’d love a best of each correspondent and a 2000 election compilation (which I liked better than their 2004 material).

Overheard this morning during the few seconds between when my wife’s alarm went off and when she hit the snooze button :

“Mr Secretary, do you think this may be related to al Qaeda.”

Well, shit. There’s no falling back asleep after hearing that.

Jeez. Joe “tied for third place” Lieberman doesn’t get it. The voters of Connecticut looked at you and your opponent and decided they like him better. End of story. The election is over and you lost. Cluelessness like this isn’t just infuriating, it’s pathetic :

“Now let me tell you how I see where we are now,” the senator continued, in a speech that was less of a concession than a confirmation that he would not back down. “I’m a sports fan, so I’m going to use a sports comparison, and as I see it in this campaign, we’ve just finished the first half and the Lamont team is ahead. But in the second half, our team — Team Connecticut — is going to surge forward to victory in November.”

Here’s a sports analogy you can wrap your head around :

You lost dude. Have a little dignity and give up.

Here’s a little parting gift for little Joey Lieberman and his doomsaying allies.

You lost the confidence of the Democratic party Joe and you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.

I can’t remember which of my friends said this, but it’s a line too good to not steal. Apparently my friend isn’t the only crossword puzzle fan irked by the Sudoku fad :

There are two reasons why Sudoku drives so many crossword experts to drink. First, the artistic reason: Some puzzle writers view Sudoku as too boring, a mindless game you can practically brute-force a solution out of any time you want, like a word search. This criticism isn’t entirely fair, though, since Sudoku, like crosswords, can be calibrated to very high levels of solving difficulty, and there is a certain mathematical elegance in the deep logic required to unravel key areas of a well-made, tough Sudoku.

The deeper reason for the backlash is sheer resentment: Many of us have spent serious chunks of our lives honing the craft of crossword-puzzle writing, and along comes this computer-generated fad that’s winning the hearts and minds of the masses. If everyone loves Sudoku so much, who needs us anymore? With one click of his mouse, Gould — who provides his puzzles free to 400 papers around the world as a marketing plan to sell his Sudoku-generating program — quite possibly entertains more people than all the crossword writers in the United States combined. And because Sudoku isn’t language-specific, Gould’s reach is international to a much greater degree than ours is. Hence, the hurt feelings — and the hostility. Pity the successful; they pay for it somehow.

Then again, I haven’t seen any one-size-fits-all strategies for beating crossword puzzles. Kinda reminds me of those people who used to memorize patterns and play Pac-Man for hours at a time on one quarter. Now that you’ve figured out how simple the game is, how can it still be any fun?

Let me throw out a quick plug for the website of my friend Ross Lincoln. Take a second to check out his homepage at ThisSpaceForRent.org. For those who have been closely following the Lieberman/Lamont race, Ross’s site might look familiar because it looks exactly like the “hacked” version of Lieberman’s homepage :

Ross’s site looks like that because he wasn’t paying his hosting bill, but Joementum wants people to believe that his suspended account is due to a hacking or denial of service attack by bloggers. Every political blogger I’ve ever met barely knows HTML, so the idea that the blogosphere is full of technically savvy hackers is laughable. Funnier still is that the message on the Lieberman site is a common site for anyone who’s been to their fair share of “slashdotted” sites.

The fact that the site still isn’t up? Well, even the best hacker in the world is no match for a decent sysadmin. Build a new server, restore from tape backup, point the DNS to the new server, and throw as much of the site as you can at an edge caching service like Akamai. Most high-end web hosts should have disaster recovery procedures in place for emergencies like this and be able to plan ahead for predictable bandwidth spikes. Even if every accusation from the Lieberman campaign was true, the fact that the site is still down can only be laid at the feet of incompetent administrators or a campaign too cheap to pay for high quality web hosting.

SPECTERED (v) – (1) To be decieved through an unfulfilled claim of action. (2) To make promises publicly that are privately contradicted. Named for Sen. Arlen Specter a vocal critic of George Bush who never seems to follow-through on his promises of Congressional oversight. Sample : “Though Sen. Pat Roberts claims to be upset about the White House’s witholding of Iraqi intelligence, I fear we’re just being spectered again. ” Related words : McCainy, Lieberweenie

No, no pictures of my pet senator Joe bathing himself and playing with yarn. I just wanted to add something to the incredibly enormous anti-Joe cacophony building in gleeful anticipation of his potential demise.

Atrios, commenting on rumors that Joe is expecting to be offered SecDef in the Bush administration, says:

…consider what it would mean if he expected to do so after the November elections. It would mean that Joe would be deliberately handing his Senate seat over to a Republican – the governor is a Republican, after all, and would appoint a replacement until the special election. If Joe were running for re-election knowing that he was going to dance into the SecDef job soon afterwards that would, in fact, be his greatest betrayal.

(Emphasis mine)

I want to talk about that for a second. Now, Atrios is no slouch and he’s absolutely right that this would be a monumental betrayal. But Joe’s greatest? Well, it depends on whether or not you think The Sword in the Stone was better before or after the 1959 revisions.

As other, more-powerful-in-the-force bloggers have noted, there’s a weird insistence among centrist democrats that Joe, whatever us crazy leftist bloggers may think of him, is actually a nice guy. There’s furthermore a strong tendency among Joe Fans to insist that he’s a good democrat and that he was a loyal Gore ally during their presidential run.

Some of them even imply (or state outright) that if Joe goes free agent after next week’s primary, forces a three way election and ends up helping the Republicans to squeeze in an upset victory, the fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars, but in Ned Lamont. you know, instead of with Joe, who refuses to accept the will of his constituents and support the winner. Because Joe, being nice, is somehow not being disloyal to his party, or if he is, it’s the first time.

What I want to ask these people is: Were you paying attention in 2000? I’ve been pissed off at Joe since the 2,000 election. And not because of his pathetic behavior during the coup, but because he pulled the ultimate sell-out of Gore – he refused to relinquish his senate seat and ran, simultaneously, for both the presidency and the senate.

But that’s not the worst of it. As Atrios says, if Joe were to do what rumors are claiming, it would be a Betrayal. But, to explain my reference to The once And Future Kingt it would also be a remake of an older betrayal, because Joe’s done it before.

Who was governor of Connecticut in 2000? John G. Rowland.

Connecticut isn’t a right wing state now and it certainly wasn’t in 2000. But like now, they had a republican Governor.

If Joe was half the man his supporters claim he is, he would have supported another Democrat to take his seat. With the power of his incumbency and the (arguable) momentum of his position as a VP candidate, he could have worked to help keep the seat in Democratic hands, should Gore have (rightly) won the presidency. Instead, he had it both ways – no matter what happened, Joe was going to make out regardless of Gore’s fate. However, Rowland was a republican. By running for both his senate seat and for VP, had Gore won, Joe would have handed the seat to the Republicans.

Maybe Joe doesn’t want to be SecDef. And maybe he would turn down any offer to serve in the Bush Administration. But I doubt it. Joe was perfectly willing to f-… I mean, unlovingly make love to us before. He’s been, er, unlovingly making love to us for 6 years. And he’ll keep doing it.

Hi everyone, Ross Lincoln here, again.

GFD*, it turns out that while I was busy sitting around doing nothing, Arthur Lee died today.

(Now Playing: The Red Telephone, by Love)

The VH1 version of his life is as follows: Arthur Lee was a genius, there’s no doubt of that. He was also a violent drug addict who ruined his gifts, his health and his sanity over the course of nearly 30 years of various addictions, and then managed near the end of his life to defy the odds and resurrect his reputation, career and life before dying anticlimactically, today, of cancer.

The personal version is as follows: Arthur Lee was for a very short period of time, the lead singer and songwriter of Love, a band of a godlike genius whose music changed my life. Arthur Lee also had some tremendously awful flaws which, thankfully, didn’t end up killing him and unlike too many mad geniuses, he actually lived to experience the adulation and respect his good work deserved.

The band he’s famous for, Love, experienced approximately 2 years of noteworthy creative brilliance – their first success was a cover of Burt Bacharach’s “My Little Red Book” in 1966. 1967 they released two albums, the experimental Da Capo, and their masterpiece Forever Changes. Soon after, Arthur flipped out, fired everyone and went insane for 3 decades.

Love, along with the music of The Left Banke, (about whom I’ll talk about some other time,) changed the way I thought about the late 60s. This didn’t happen immediately, unfortunately. The first Love song I ever heard was The Damned’s brilliant cover of Alone, Again, Or, which you can find on their 2 disc compilation The Light At The End of the Tunnel.

I first heard the Damned’s version of this song in 1989, and being somewhat musically ADD, it wasn’t until 1996 that it actually occurred to me to go looking for the original version, to find out who this band was that the Damned (and Pulp, and other bands I respected) were so hungry about. Thanks to a used import version of one of their CDs I borrowed from a friend even nerdier about music than I am in early 1998, I heard the original version of the song, and I’ve been in love with them ever since.

I had always felt that despite so much good music immediately prior to it, the late 60s period was filled largely with the worst American Music had to offer. (Yes, I really hate Janis Joplin, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and any doors song where Jim is allowed to act like the Douche laureate.) I still feel that this period is the most pathetically self-congratulatory era in popular music. It was, let’s be frank, a time when even Jim Morrison peeing into Paul McCartney’s ears would be hailed as a work of transcendent genius.

That’s why to my ears, it’s the music that defies the era’s conventions that is the most riveting, and with the exception of Scott Walker, Love is the period’s most convention defying band. When I say that Forever Changes is a masterpiece, I don’t say so lightly. It is one of the few records released during the era absolutely worthy of the title.

If you haven’t heard Forever Changes before, I suspect it’s because it’s an interesting album that contains virtually no hippie cliches, which means self congratulatory baby boomers ignore it, and oldies stations won’t play it. At the time, it was released largely to the sound of crickets chirping. Fortunately, over the decades to come it would be recognized for the brilliance it is and would end up influencing everyone from Pulp and Belle and Sebastian to pretty much every modern Los Angeles Based band. (See Greg? Your love of B&S really was long overdue!) Forever Changes is amazingly timeless, filled with surreal lyrics, beautiful string arrangements, rhythmic unpredictability and studio experimentation that were decades ahead of its time.

Unfortunately, Arthur Lee also had a cocaine habit decades ahead of its time too, and it pretty much fried his brain. He melted down in 1968, fired the entire band and hired scabs. Love’s next recordings sounded like Grateful Dead San Fransisco Sound bullshit and Love received the punishment the Dead richly deserved but never got: nobody listened to them. Lee spent the 70s and 80s drifting in and out of drug induced stupors and brushes with the law until 1996, when he threatened a neighbor with a gun, was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm and was third-striked into a prison sentence.

The only good thing about that is that he cleaned up, and when he got out of lock down in 2001, he formed a new version of Love and discovered that during the 5 years he was in jail, his reputation and critical evaluation had drastically improved. He formed a new version of Love that was actually good and achieved a small measure of the success that eluded him during his lost decades.

I wish I had more to say. While I never realistically expected Arthur Lee to again create on the level of his youth, I’m sad that he didn’t get more time to enjoy the fruits of his faded brilliance.

If you haven’t listened to Love before, go out and purchase Love Story 1966-1972, which is a pretty comprehensive and also, coincidentally, pretty amazing box set. If anyone reading this is unfamiliar with them and wants to dabble before purchasing, send me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to send you an MP3 for your enjoyment.

UPDATE. Friend of the Talent Show Steveaudio has a great post about Arthur Lee over at his site, and it has the added benefit of being from the perspective of someone who actually experienced Love during their Sunset Strip Days. (Also interesting to note they were contemporaries of the Doors, who I don’t hate as much as I think Jim morrison was a wanker extraordinaire.)

*It’s ancronym. Figure it out.