As Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, among others, has noted the Shrubbery keeps claiming that protection from threats is the President’s most important job, and justification for anything he wants to do.

If you read the preamble to the Constitution, it is obviously not the case:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Defense comes in at number 4, not number 1.

[Read more →]

DARPA has announced that because of the wording in the latest Defense spending bill, the DOD won’t award cash in the next robot race.

We can spend billions on the missile defense system that has given us no indication that it will ever work, but cannot award a $2 million dollar prize to a group that actually accomplishes a stated goal that will lead to robotic vehicles for use in combat.

Understand that this is the latest in a series of races, and if no one accomplishes the task, as has happened, no prize is awarded. The DoD is forbidden to reward competence, but can give billions to people who fail to fulfill their contracts? I guess you need an MBA from Harvard to understand this reasoning.

Minou at French Tidbits is not thrilled with the latest browser from Bill. To be fair, she could not give it a full evaluation because it’s too bloated to run on her computer.

It’s looking like the newest offerings from Microsoft are not going to happy with less than a 2 gigahertz processor, 1 gigabyte of memory, a 100-gigabyte hard drive, and a DVD drive.

I spoke too soon when I told Jack at the Grumpy Forester that we had taken care of our ballot initiatives during the primary election, because there are six of them on the sample ballot.

I will be voting for Number 3, which increase the percentage of voters who must approve a constitutional amendment to 60% and Number 8, which reins in Eminent Domain.

I don’t think the state constitution should be amended by a bare majority of people who vote in an election and we already have too many extraneous provisions in the constitution.

For the newspaper editors in Florida who don’t think eminent domain proceedings to transfer property to private developers on the promise of tax increases is a problem: get on the Internet; go to Google.com; enter “eminent domain florida lawsuit” and start reading the 400,000+ sites that you get in response. CRAs all over the state have been abusing the power and it’s time for the abuse to stop. Understand these sites only cover the people who have the resources to “fight city hall,” and not the hundreds of small landowners who give up when threatened with eminent domain by developers. The threats have happened locally to people I know personally, so don’t try to tell me: it’s not a problem.

[Read more →]

CBS News is reporting that the senior UN envoy in Sudan has been declared persona non grata by the government for his comments in his personal blog.

Sudan Evicts U.N. Envoy For Blogging:

The Sudanese government Sunday ordered the chief U.N. envoy to leave the country within three days after he wrote that the Sudanese army had suffered serious losses in fighting with rebels in northern Darfur.

The official Sudan News Agency said the order was issued against the envoy, Jan Pronk of the Netherlands, because he had demonstrated “enmity to the Sudanese government and the armed forces” and was involved in unspecified activities “that are incompatible with his mission.”

Telling the truth with get you in trouble every time. He should have blogged in Dutch.

1. For those who are unfamiliar with the term: dooced

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.