"War on Christmas" exposed by New Yorker; O'Reilly annoyed

Hendrik Hertzberg writes of the bogus "War on Christmas" being pushed by Fox News in The New Yorker:

The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist.

He goes on to note that

Today’s Christmas Pentagon is the Fox News Channel, which during a recent five-day period carried no fewer than fifty-eight different segments about the ongoing struggle, some of them labelled “Christmas under attack.”

and discusses John Gibson's book and Bill O'Reilly's role as "Patton." Near the end, he notes:

In this war, no weapons of Christmas destruction have been found—just a few caches of linguistic oversensitivity and commercial caution. Christmas remains robust: even Gibson says in his book that in America Christmas celebrators (ninety-six per cent) outnumber Christians (eighty-four per cent). But the “Happy Holidays” contagion has probably spread too far to be wiped out.

O'Reilly's response on December 20:

O'REILLY: Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." New Yorker magazine joins our hall of shame. We are recommending readers and sponsors avoid the publication. The reason: that magazine allows writer Hendrik Hertzberg to print dishonest propaganda fed to him by left-wing smear sites. As I previously stated, any publication or news operation that does that will be listed on BillOReilly.com as
not worthy of your attention or advertising dollars. The spin and the propaganda stop here. The New Yorker magazine should be ashamed and is absolutely ridiculous. And one note to Mr. Hertzberg: You might want to rethink your practice of character assassination, sir. Just looking out for you.

And Fox's John Gibson, author of The War on Christmas, got into a shouting match with Rob Boston of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, with Gibson threatening to sue Boston for pointing out O'Reilly's falsehood about green and red clothing being prohibited by Plano, Texas schools. As it turns out, there were some prohibitions about party items and gifts in Plano schools which included such things as paper plate color, which led to a lawsuit; that ban was revoked and the guidelines made more sensible--e.g., students could give each other religious-themed gifts, but teachers (who are acting in an official capacity and represent the state) cannot give religious-themed gifts to students.

O'Reilly has retracted his comment about a ban on red and green clothing.

Major flaw in Diebold voting machines

It is possible to preload a memory card with negative votes that are not recognized by the machine, but which affect the final outcome in an undetectible manner. In the test described in a Wired article, a mock vote was held on the question of whether Diebold machines could be hacked, with eight votes. The eight votes fed into the machines (via optically scanned paper ballots) were six "no" votes and two "yes" votes. The outcome recorded on the rigged card was one "no" and seven "yes"--the memory card was preloaded with -5 "no" votes and 5 "yes" votes. By balancing out the preloaded votes (with a sum of zero), the final record showed an accurate number of votes, but not an accurate record of what the votes were.

Further flaws indicate that the Diebold machines execute code residing on the memory cards, without doing checks on the content of that code which are required by Federal Elections Commission standards.

As a result of the hacking demonstrations by Finnish security expert Harri Hurst in Florida on December 13, Leon and Volusia counties in Florida have cancelled their contracts with Diebold.

Much more at blackboxvoting.org.

Outsourced to India: lawyers

The December 17th issue of The Economist has an article ("The next wave") about projected growth in India's "Business Process Offshoring" (BPO) industry. While today two-thirds of the $250 billion of annual spending on legal services goes to the United States, 28% of the available global workforce with the requisite language and technical skills is in India. Since India's law is based on English common law, it is in a good position to take a large portion of that business from lawyers in the United States, with a 75% reduction in cost for the buyer. The Economist notes that this is "not just a question of 'paralegal' hack work such as document preparation' but includes 'drafting contracts and patent applications, research and negotiation.'"

Let's all weep a few tears for U.S. lawyers being put out of work.

Cory Maye Trial Transcripts Online

Over at the Agitator (PDFs).

Standards on evidence obtained by torture

In the UK, the Law Lords ruled early this month that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissible in court, including evidence obtained by foreign governments (such as the United States) through the use of torture--and the burden of proof that the evidence was not obtained by torture falls upon the government. Lord Bingham stated, "The English common law has regarded torture and its fruits with abhorrence for over 500 years ... I am startled, even a little dismayed, at the suggestion...that this deeply rooted tradition and an international obligation solemnly and explicitly undertaken can be overridden by a statute." The panel of seven judges was unanimous in its ruling that the evidence of torture was inadmissible, but divided on the standard the government must overcome to demonstrate the evidence was not admitted by torture once a defendant produces a "plausible reason" to think that it was. Three of the judges (including Lord Bingham) argued for a standard that the government show "no real risk" of basis on torture, the other four that the government show it "on the balance of probabilities."

In the United States, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have argued strongly against any restrictions on the use of torture by the United States, while at the same time claiming that the United States does not use torture. While Bush has recently and reluctantly agreed to support the McCain amendment on torture, that amendment states that "No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation." Ten classified pages have just been added to that manual, leading some to suggest that this has created a way around the McCain amendment.

Fortunately, however, the McCain amendment goes on to say that "No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." It defines "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" as "the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984."

But there seems little question that Bush and Cheney want to push the limits as far as they possibly can.

Daniel Morgan v. Jonathan Witt

Daniel Morgan has posted a response to Jonathan Witt's criticism of his summary of the Sternberg Saga.

Morgan has admitted where he's made mistakes--can Witt and the Discovery Institute give that a try?

Errors in the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision

It's an excellent decision. I did spot nineteen errors, none of significance to the legal arguments (three are typos, one's a mistaken word choice, and fifteen are instances of the same erroneous character substitution, probably facilitated by the ever-helpful Microsoft Word). Will ID advocates find them and make rhetorical use of them? The typos are on pp. 51, 114, and 120, the mistaken word choice is on p. 96, and the three examples of the incorrect character are on pp. 104, 106, 117, 118, 120, 124, 129, and 130. Warning: Reading these pages (which I strongly recommend--in fact, read the whole thing) will expose you to documentation of dishonesty and sleaziness by Christian school board members, including taking a mural depicting evolution from the classroom and burning it.

Buckingham and Bonsell come across as sleazy, lying, manipulative bastards, and the rest of the board come across as ignoramuses rubber-stamping their actions. The citizens of Dover certainly did the right thing by voting out the entire school board.

The science teachers of Dover, however, come across as very reasonable people who made a few compromises with the board early on in order to get the textbooks they needed to teach, but who were unwilling to teach unscientific materials or read a misleading disclaimer to their students.

Dover Decision: ID is religious

Judge John E. Jones III has issued his ruling in the Dover, PA intelligent design case--Dover's ID Policy violates both the Lemon Test and the endorsement test, and so the Dover Area School District must discontinue reading the statement at the beginning of the evolution unit about Intelligent Design and the availability of Of Pandas and People in the library. The decision covers much broader ground than this, and though the orders are only directed at DASD, this decision is likely to be influential in much the way Judge Overton's McLean v. Arkansas creation science decision was in 1982. Ed Brayton has the text of the decision and some key quotes and commentary up at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

1981? ...82?

I never cease to be amazed at how the White House's own web page is faithfully documenting and publicizing this administration's stupidities. In a way, I guess, it's strangely comforting. I mean, consider the alternative. What if all the embarassing Bushisms were whitewashed away, replaced by erudite prose? The implications, if that were the case, bring disturbing thoughts to mind--memory holes... Ministries of Truth... that sort of thing.

It seems we're not quite there, yet, as you can plainly see here, where Alberto Gonzales does a lot of hand-waving, dodging, and dashing in response to the question, "If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally?"

That question was asked earlier. We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

My translation: "It wasn't bloody likely that we would be able to do what we wanted legally, but we went ahead and did it anyway."

Billmon over at The Whiskey Bar has an even better translation.

Paul Mirecki situation

My opinion is similar to those of Ed Brayton and John Lynch. I think some skepticism about the attack is in order, it's unfortunate that the university took action against Mirecki and shut down his proposed course, and I wasn't impressed with the quality of Gary Hurd's defense of Mirecki at the Panda's Thumb and its speculations about martial artists inflicting just so much but no more injury on Mirecki.