Democrats water board Mukasy

Watched the hearings on CSpan. Democrats, Biden and Grassley and others tried to get new Attorney General Mukasy to say that waterboarding is torture. Mukasy did a duck and weave and managed to avoid getting pinned down. A least in the morming session. Didn't bother to watch the afternoon session. The democrats wanted Mukasy to call waterboarding torture because there is a law against torture. With waterboarding defined as torture by the new US Attorney General, they can go after some waterboarders, making the administration look bad.
We are pretty sure CIA waterboarded some ugly captives, that fuss about "interrogation tapes" last week must have been about a video taped waterboarding session. CIA summoned up the guts to destroy the tapes before they got posted on UTube. CIA has been fairly worthless lately but at least they have some sense of self preservation. It's a start for them. Needless to say the last thing Mukasy or anyone else wants is a another Valerie Plame kind of case where some special prosecutor goes looking for CIA waterboarders. It's just too messy, and damaging to the national interest. So Mukasy won't say waterboarding is torture, even if they waterboard him. Besides, these are senators. If they feel waterboarding is torture they can pass a law to that effect, if they have the votes, which they probably don't.
Personally I'm not in favor of duress, extreme duress, or torture for interrogation. Under duress the subject will tell you anything you want to hear, just to make it stop hurting. It's against the principles of America, the principles of my religion, and my conscience. Plus I gotta weak stomach.
On the other hand, if a few Al Quada scumbags got waterboarded that's too bad. Some practical minded Americans decided to extract information by practical measures. I don't necessarily approve, but I am not ready to condemn. Especially not for terrorists who dress teenagers in explosive vests and send them out to kill innocent bystanders.

Go see "Charlie Wilson's War"

Great movie. Good dialog, funny bits, cast of 1000's, good guys win in the end. Good acting, follows the book closely enough. Charlie Wilson is a hard partying, hard drinking, trouble-getting-into Texas Congressman with a staff composed entirely of hot women. An outrageous rich Texas society woman gets Charlie into Pakistan, and the Paki's helicopter Charlie up to an Afghan refugee camp. The Afghan's misery and willingness to fight the Soviets wins Charlie's heart. Back in DC he hooks up with an old line CIA case officer, Gust Ava-something-or-other. Unlike most CIA troops, Gust hates communists and wants to fight them. Charlie gets the appropriations thru Congress, Gust gets the arms into Afghanistan, and the Russians start taking hits. Good scenes of Afghanis packing ultra modern guided missiles on muleback, US Congressmen in dark suits and dark glasses walking thru refugee camps full of camels, refugees in native dress, burning tires, tents, jeeps, kids.
One downer. The sound men have muddled the sound track and a lot of the funnier bits of dialog cannot be heard over the score and the sound effects. Plus the actors mumble.
Go and see it. This is one of the few decent movies to come out of Hollywood.

The glass is only half full according to NPR

The clock radio was play NPR this morning, and they had a long piece on President Bush's State pf the Union address. They picked over every paragraph, and rephrased it in negative terms. "The war is Iraq is going better" became "It has a long way to go". "The Iraq parliament passed the debaathification law" became "They haven't passed an oil law". And on, and on...
I used to think NPR was reasonably non partisan. That seems to be fading. This broadcast was a democratic party hit piece.

President Bush's State of the Union address

I watched it. Not bad, I stayed awake to the end. Bush spoke well. The content of the speech was a long long laundry list of things the Congress oughta do. Most of them were OK bu me. He said "future" earmarks in committee reports will NOT be honored. The congress critters will have to actually get the pork into the appropriations bill and get it voted on and signed, as opposed to the current system where the administration works from the committee report, a behind the scenes document the no one has seen.
Too bad "future" pork means next year's pork, when Bush will be out of office. I wish he had said "all earmarks starting with the ones in the 07 omnibus spending bill".

How smart are bankers, really?

Brian Wesbury writing on the Wall St Journal's op-ed page said "Beneath every dollar of counterpary risk, and every swap, or leveraged loan is a real economic asset." Oh really? Let's parse that out. "Real economic asset" should be something like a house, a car, a factory, an airliner, something physical that can be repossessed and sold. Then there are "near real economic assets" like paper money, stocks and bonds. Issued by powerful governments or corporations, the near real stuff depends upon the strength of the issuer rather than intrinsic value. Both real and near real assets are reasonable things to buy and sell.
Then we come to "securitized mortgage bonds". Are these real? A mortgage is real, the mortgage holder can seize the property if the borrower defaults. The owners of securitized mortgage bonds don't get that right. Are they backed by powerful corporations? No way, they are "off the books" and offered by "special investment vehicles". In short, the "sub prime mortgage crisis" roiling Wall St is the trading of unreal securities. Investors wised up last summer and stopped buying them.
Brian Westbury is the chief economist for First Trust Portfolios, L.P. His faulty understanding of the economy seems to be wide spread on Wall St. Investors with First Trust are in for a bad time in the very near future.

Falling Satellites

News is full of stories about a US reconnaissance satellite about to de orbit. It's fairly big and they have no prediction about where and when it will actually reentry. Much of the usual "sky-is-falling" talk. Vermont Public Radio compared the incident with the Skylab re entry and another US satellite reentry. VPR made no mention of the Soviet nuclear powered radar ocean reconnaissance satellite that crashed in northern Canada twenty odd years ago, complete with fallout from the smashed nuclear reactor. I guess they don't want to accuse the peaceful Soviets of flying military recon satellites, even when the Soviets have been out of business for better than a decade.
For that matter, VPR always describes the spacecraft as "spy satellites" rather than "photo recon satellites". Spying is illegal, and spies get executed. Reconnaissance is a legal operation of war or peace time.

The Cuckoo's Egg gets real.

Back in the late 1980's Clifford Stoll was a computer systems admin at UC Berkeley. Small amounts of University CPU time were un accounted for. In running down the discrepancy Stoll discovered that he had a hacker logging into his Unix machine and fishing around for passwords and classified data. After a year or more or cat and mouse computer games, Stoll localized the hacker to an apartment in Hannover West Germany. He had the telephone number, the street address, the name of the hacker. West German police wanted to bust said hacker, but West German law was very protective about civil liberties. The West German cops said they needed a complaint from the Americans before they could arrest the hacker since breaking into American computers was not a crime in West Germany.
Stoll tried every thing he could over a course of months to get the FBI interested in the case. No luck. The Bureau was into its stupid phase.
Now, twenty years later, the Americans are going to do something about hackers. About time. According the the Wash Post, American intelligence agencies will be watching the net for hackers breaking into US government computers.
More effective would be to ban the use of Windows for all government work due to rediculous vulnerability.