John Yoo on Justice Stevens

Interesting op ed piece in the Wall St Journal today. John Yoo, the author, is the Justice department lawyer from the Bush administration who dared to give written guidance to CIA about the difference between legitimate interrogation and torture. Yoo provided useful and clear cut guide lines as to what was legal and what was not. For this service Yoo has been vilified by democrats and his guide lines denounced as torture memos.
Yoo tells the story of way back during WWII, John Paul Stevens was a Navy intelligence officer who was in on the Yamamoto operation. American code breakers intercepted and decyphered Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's travel schedule. A squadron of P-38 fighters was dispatched to intercept Yamamoto's plane. The mission was successful, the Betty bomber carrying Yamamoto was shot down into the jungle. Yamamoto was killed in action by P-38 machine gun fire.
Sixty years later, the now Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens opined that "The targeting of a particular individual with the intent to kill him was a lot different than killing a soldier in battle and dealing with a statistic".
Wow. Stevens believes knowing the enemy's name makes some kind of difference in the morality of killing him. There is some difference between the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers killed by Marines who didn't know their names, and a high ranking navy officer killed by Air Force pilots who did know who they were gunning for?
Far as I am concerned, killing uniformed enemy in war time, although distasteful, is necessary, legal, and moral. Certainly more moral than nuking enemy cities. That a US Supreme Court justice fails to understand this is appalling.
Could Obama nominate a replacement with better sense?

Tea Party Manchester NH April 15 2010

I went. Large enthusiastic crowd. We filled up Victory Square in downtown Manchester.


That's a whole city block covered with people. Everybody was polite, the crowd listened to the speakers and applauded the applause lines. There were no hecklers. Lots of speakers, Congressmen, former Congressmen, and New Hampshire activists. A common thread among speakers, the country is going down the tubes and the only chance of salvation is get to the polls in November and vote the rascals OUT.
All the Republican candidates were there, I saw Kelly Ayotte, Karen Testerman, and Bill Binder.



I'm told Bill Binnie and Jennifer Horne were present. The place was wall to wall campaign yard signs. No Democrats attended. The organizers mentioned they had invited democrats but none accepted.

Some more pictures are here



Skip Murphy of GraniteGrok, a leading NH blog, set up a "Meet New Hampshire Bloggers thing" with tables, chairs, WiFi, and electric power. Some 5 or 6 of us brought laptops and live blogged the affair. Aside from difficulty reading LCD screens in daylight, and typing fingers stiffened by the cold, it worked out well. Thanks Skip for doing that. We bloggers are covering the event. I didn't see anyone from TV stations or newspapers. So this, and other humble blogs, may be the only public record of the event.

Keep this up and we can have a Republican landslide in November.

--
David J. Starr

Obama blames Big Branch Mine Disaster on Management

Obama just got off national TV. He is blaming management for the accident. He gave no facts, just his conclusion "Management did it". Union people are always happy to hear that.
The real cause of the explosion was methane gas, which escapes from the coal. There are published standards for this, how much methane is allowable, periodic tests that must be run, and a requirement for ventilation. Obama did not discuss these issues at all. He did not show that mine management allowed methane to exceed published limits, failed to run required tests, or failed to ventilate the mine.
Management is strongly motivated to prevent their multi billion dollar mine from blowing itself to kingdom come. There is no return on investment after the investment blows itself away. If management was venal or incompetent Obama gave no evidence to support that view.
Citing a number of safety writeups from government inspectors is unconvincing. I used to be in that business. When I was inspecting, I could always find things to write up. Longer I looked, the more I could find. Unless it can be shown that methane was allowed to accumulate before the accident, it ain't management's fault.

Z1485 Point&Shoot as a video camera

I'm going to a tea party tomorrow. The net is warning us all to bring video cameras to record any SIEU thuggery or liberal attempts to discredit the tea party. So I got out my trusty Kodak Z1485 point-n-shoot. This little wonder has a video mode. To give the camera some breathing room, I transferred all my still photos to computers and zapped the camera memory card clean.
Taking videos is simplicity squared. Just turn the knob to video (icon of a movie camera) and press the button. It even records sound. It consumes about 2 megabytes of memory per second. With the smallest 2 Gigabyte memory card it will record 1000 seconds (15 minutes) of very decent looking video.
Playback on the camera is done the same way you review still photos. You can move the video off the camera and onto your computer with nothing more than Windows Explorer. Just plug in the camera's USB cable, and Explorer will "see" the camera as if it were a CD or floppy disc. The video is stored in files named xxxxxx.mov where xxxxxx is a arbitrary number. Just drag the .mov file onto hard drive. From hard drive it will play back with QuickTime or my son's media play program "VLC".
Should I capture anything worthy tomorrow I will figure out how to upload it to U-Tube. Presumably that isn't too hard since zillions of people are doing it.

There's one born every minute

Verizon has found another one. They are trying to sell phone lines in 14 states to Frontier Communications. Frontier is OK with paying $8.6 billion for 4.6 million land lines ($1797 per line). It would take 10 years for my phone bill to pay off $1797. According to the Wall St Journal, the deal is opposed only by the Communications Workers of America and only in the state of West Virginia.
Frontier ought to know that if these land lines were worth anything, Verizon wouldn't be selling them.
Verizon's telephone line spin off in Hawaii caused the Hawaiian buyer to go bankrupt in 2008. Verizon's sell off of rural New England telephone lines to Fairpoint Communications caused Fairpoint to go bankrupt in 2009. Verizon spun off Yellow Pages and they went bankrupt too.
Verizon sees it's future in cell phones and internet. It's dumping the rural phone business. The suckers who buy rural phone lines are doomed. Verizon wasn't making money on rural phone service with all the poles and wires paid for, long ago. The suckers think they can make money on the same business when saddled with a heavy debt they used to buy the business from Verizon. Ain't gonna happen.
In the Fairpoint catastrophe, the stockholders and banks got wiped out, the workers are facing layoffs, and service has deteriorated so badly that everyone is switching to a cell phone.
Wanna bet the same thing happens to Frontier? Dunno why the Frontier suits are falling for this scam, but they are. And the Public Utility Commissions in 14 states are not saying "boo".

Ron Hunt died last Sunday

Ron Hunt was a long time Franconia resident. Cancer finally got him last weekend. Ron was a member of the Franconia Fire Dept, a selectman, ran the auto salvage yard, and just about everyone in town knew him or knew who he was. He got a decent sendoff, 300 people attended services, held out of doors in the center of town. This in a town of only 900 registered voters. Fireman in full dress uniform, the Franconia antique engine, Ron's pulling tractor, and a great big tent. A dozen of Ron's friends and relatives spoke movingly.
A pillar of the community and we will miss him.

What happened to Protestants on the Supreme Court?

News reports tell me that retiring Supreme Court justice Stevens is the last Protestant on the high court. Everyone left is Catholic or Jewish. This ought to say something about the miserable state of the Protestant church in America. Jews and Catholics have a solid tradition of absolute right and wrong that goes back to the time of Jesus and before. Modern Protestants have bought into a relative morality that can permit a lot of dreadful things. Seems like when selecting honorable men to serve on the high court the body politic looks for men who believe in absolute right and wrong, rather than a slippery relative right and wrong.