Here’s how ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero characterizes the recent Congressional vote on the NSA “wireless surveillance” program: Democratic “leaders” have crossed the line and betrayed the will of the majority who put them in power in 2006. This week, a timid Congress caved in to President Bush and his demand for more out-of-control authority to spy on Americans. Caved. To Chimperor’s demand that he be allowed to act “out

From the New Criterion, “Lying For the Truth” (Nov 1993): The thirst for moral justification for one’s life in the world is one of our deepest needs, one of our most powerful and essentially human drives, ignored at our cost and peril. In his “Innocents’ Clubs,” Münzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More perhaps than any other person

…to Michael Kasun for the Zappa You Are What You Is CD. I plan on loading it onto my iPod later today and giving it a thorough going over. Before that, though, I have to go sweat my way through Kenpo in the hopes that someday I’ll be able to get my foot up near my head. Sure, it’s easier to put it in my mouth that way. But it’s

The DoJ has decertified Pinnacle’s Dragon Skin body armor, “a severe blow to Pinnacle’s campaign to have Dragon Skin fielded by the US Army,” notes Hot Air’s Byran Preston, “and put into service in combat”: Pinnacle had previously used NIJ certification as evidence that Dragon Skin is of sufficient quality to be used in combat. That line of argument is now taken away. For the record, NIJ certification standards and

From Anthony H. Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies: From my perspective, the US now has only uncertain, high risk options in Iraq. It cannot dictate Iraq’s future, only influence it, and this presents serious problems at a time when the Iraqi political process has failed to move forward in reaching either a new consensus or some form of peaceful coexistence. It is Iraqis that will shape Iraq’s ability