Month: August 2005

Pirates, Barbary and Otherwise.

“What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism…Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists…The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.” Via Breaching the Web, author Douglas Burgess makes an intriguing case in Legal Affairs for using long-standing anti-piracy laws to fight terrorism. Definitely worth a read, and not only because I have pirates-on-the-brain after finishing the literary (and highly-condensable) exploits of Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds earlier this week.)

Diebold Redux.

“We…know that Bush ‘won’ Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters. More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count.” None dare call it stolen? A new report by Pomona professor Dennis Loo offers considerable evidence that election 2004 witnessed more GOP monkey business than has been previously reported in the mainstream press.

Casino Jack in Hollywood.

“The film was to be a manifesto for Abramoff; a Rambo-like morality tale and a grand indictment of communism — his Reagan Doctrine parable in action-packed Technicolor. And in the process of conceiving of and making it, Abramoff helped groom an African despot, rose to high levels in the K Street food chain, and got to play international spy.” Salon‘s James Verini discloses the sordid tale of Red Scorpion and GOP bagman Jack Abramoff’s brief flirtation with the movie biz.

Mr. Nice/Ninth guy?

“And that’s why John Roberts doesn’t alarm me much. The same conservatism that leads him to decry judicial overreaching in the privacy and civil rights contexts is part and parcel of a larger conservatism that distrusts reckless grandiosity…Roberts cares a lot about looking temperate, and that isn’t a bad thing in a judge.” As Senators Ted Kennedy and Patrick Leahy turn up the heat on the Roberts nod, Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick argues that, at the very least, he seems temperamentally unsuited to be a judicial bomb-thrower. That’s good, ’cause even with today’s news of a missing civil rights folder and a possible conflict-of-interest in a terrorism case, there doesn’t yet seem to be a silver bullet that could derail this nomination. Update: Dahlia Lithwick reconsiders after pondering Roberts’ “Woman Problem.”

Gone to Potter.

Some trailers from afar: Psychiatrist Ewan MacGregor goes slightly mad (with Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling) in the trailer for Stay, and Harry fends off Triwizard contestants and schoolboy crushes alike in this teaser for the trailer for Goblet of Fire.

The New (Non)Mutants.

The X3 cast fills out with Michael “Tanner” Murphy, Bill “Predator” Duke, and Olivia Williams as Angel’s Dad, a White House politico, and Moira McTaggart respectively, as well as House of Sand and Fog‘s Shohreh Aghdashloo as Dr. Kavita Rao. Hmmm. I really like the Olivia Williams casting (even if she isn’t Scottish), but, in general, X3 is starting to sound more and more like an overstuffed rush job.