born live love die

I don’t know that much about Turkey.  I know the Young Turks came to power about 120 years ago and tried to modernize the country.  From the outside, it looks like an Islamic country with an identity problem.  About half of the country is predominantly Kurdish.

But the drive to remain secular and not become a theocracy is strong.  Yesterday, there was a protest with about 300,000 people.  Getting out 300,000 people takes a bunch of organization.  They were protesting the Presidential aspirations of Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.  The election process there makes our electoral college look easy to understand.

In a parliamentary vote on Friday, Gul fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary to be elected after opposition lawmakers boycotted the process and called on Turkey’s constitional court to render it void.

The populace supports a more secular approach.

“They have to hear us, because we are the majority of the country. We are 70 percent,” said Emine Hacioglu, 35.

70% is a lot.  What I don’t understand is how the electoral process can be jiggered to allow the 30% to rule.

It should be noted that even though the people are deeply religious and traditional, they see value in a more secular government.

But some protesters on Sunday expressed support for the army’s stance, AP said.

“In a country like Turkey, which is not fully a democracy, the role of the army is a little different,” said 50-year-old civil engineer Haydar Kilic. “The army here likes democracy, we know that.”

Mehmet Gunes, 39, whose wife was wearing an Islamic-style headscarf, said: “We support what the army said. It’s a warning. My wife wears a headscarf — we’re not against that. We came here to stand up for a secular, enlightened Turkey. Our children’s future is important.”

Our children’s future.  Hear, hear.

The probability that Gul, whose wife wears the traditional Muslim head scarf, will become the president — possibly bolstering the role of religion in politics — has caused unease in the vastly secular nation.

“We don’t want a covered woman in Ataturk’s presidential palace,” said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife, during Sunday’s protests, AP reported. “We want civilized, modern people there.”

Mitt Romney could learn something from her.  He recently stated axiomatically that the country needed to led by a person of faith.  No, sir, we need to be led by a person of reason.  If that person has faith to help exercise that reason, more’s the better.

Lt. Col. Yingling, writing in the Armed Forces Journal, puts a torch to his career.

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

It is a remarkable essay and is clearly written.  Here is the first header and paragraph.

The Responsibilities of Generalship

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.

Lt. Col. Yingling is a brave man.  I hope his skills in resume writing match his essay writing skills, because his career is toast.

Ever since the word ‘emboldened’ showed up in the White House talking points, it has taken on a new life. Everybody’s getting emboldened. First Bush warned that the enemy would get emboldened, then broke it down to various specific enemies. To embolden is to give encouragement, to make bold. We are facing down people who strap on bombs and blow up markets, or launch mortar attacks at passing patrols when there are observation drones overhead providing a God’s eye view of the whole thing. I can see that making those guys bolder would be a bad idea.

The latest to get emboldened are the Democrats.

Over the course of only 15 minutes today, three congressional committees will consider subpoenas for half a dozen officials from the White House and the departments of Justice and State. On the list is former presidential chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Justice Department liaison to the White House Monica M. Goodling, a key figure in the controversial firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

Republican leaders call it a “partisan witch hunt.” But Democratic lawmakers, and even some Republicans, say it is an overdue return to their constitutional role of executive-branch oversight.

Since Democrats assumed control of Congress in January, they have hired more than 200 investigative staffers for key watchdog committees. They include lawyers, former reporters and congressional staffers who left oversight committees that had all but atrophied during the six years that the GOP controlled Congress and the White House. They have already begun a series of inquiries on subjects ranging from allegations of administration meddling in federal scientists’ work on global warming and the General Services Administration’s alleged work for Republican campaigns to how disproved claims that Iraq had purchased nuclear material from Niger evolved into a case for war.

Democrats have been emboldened, investigators say, by their House and Senate judiciary committee colleagues’ inquiries into the firings of U.S. attorneys.

I can stand me some more emboldenment.

With the Democratic ramp-up comes a dire need for practical experience in investigations. The Democrats’ former minority status had left them short of seasoned staffers. Before new investigators came on board, some Hill staffers resorted to using Google to search for documents, oblivious to Congress’s power to demand them.

Okay, some emboldeners with training.

When all else fails, pander to your base.  This is the way of weak politicians.  Bush, et. co., have done a masterful job of it for six years.  Bush, meet Ahmadinejad.

With the arrival of spring, Iranian police have launched a crackdown against women accused of not covering up enough, arresting nearly 300 women, some for wearing too tight an overcoat or letting too much hair peek out from under their veil, authorities said Monday.

The campaign in the streets of major cities was the toughest such crackdown in nearly two decades, raising fears that hard-liner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intends to re-impose the tough Islamic Revolution-era constraints on women’s dress that loosened in past years.

Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain, look over there!

But it could bring a backlash at a time when many Iranians resent Ahmadinejad for failing to boost the faltering economy or halt spiraling prices and blame him for isolating Iran with his fiery rhetoric. The two-day-old crackdown was already angering moderates.

Can we get some love for the anti-vice police?

Anti-vice police — many of them women — have been stopping women in the streets of the capital and other cities if they deem their dress is “un-Islamic.”

I think Iran has solved their internet dating problem.  Men and women who can’t get dates  join the anti-vice police.

Bush has taken hostages and is issuing demands.  Paul Krugman:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

This would sound funny in a movie, say, “Life of Brian”, except that it isn’t a movie and it isn’t funny.

Everyone talks about the political risks of confrontation, recalling the backlash when Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995. But there’s a big difference between trying to force a fairly popular president to accept deep cuts in Medicare — which is what the 1995 confrontation was about — and trying to get a deeply unpopular, distrusted president to set some limits on an immensely unpopular war.

Meanwhile, there are big political risks on the other side. If Congress responds to a presidential veto by offering an even weaker bill, voters may well react with disgust, concluding that the whole debate over the war was nothing but political theater.

Anyway, never mind the political calculations. Confronting Mr. Bush on Iraq has become a patriotic duty.

The fact is that Mr. Bush’s refusal to face up to the failure of his Iraq adventure, his apparent determination to spend the rest of his term in denial, has become a clear and present danger to national security. Thanks to the demands of the Iraq war, we’re already a superpower without a strategic reserve, unable to respond to crises that might erupt elsewhere in the world. And more and more military experts warn that repeated deployments in Iraq — now extended to 15 months — are breaking the back of our volunteer military.

If nothing is done to wind down this war during the 21 months — 21 months! — Mr. Bush has left, the damage may be irreparable.

Amen.

Alberto Gonzales stone walled the Senate Judiciary Committee for five hours and most people say he came away with no credibility intact. Dahlia Lithwick has an opposing view, that Bush, et. al., have a different context than we do.

So, I’ve changed my mind. On sober second thought, it occurs to me that when I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with “White House insiders” and the National Review that Alberto Gonzales disgraced himself yesterday, I may have missed something important. Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush’s “full confidence.”

Until you stop to consider that the president wasn’t watching the same movie as the rest of us and that Gonzales wasn’t reading from the same script. Perhaps what we witnessed yesterday was in fact a tour de force, a home run for the president’s overarching theory of the unitary executive.

The theory of the unitary executive is a radical vision of executive power in which the president is the big boss of the entire executive branch and has final say over everything that happens within it. At its core, the theory holds that Congress has very limited authority to divest the president of those powers. An expanded version of this theory was the legal predicate for the torture memo: “In light of the president’s complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president’s ultimate authority in these areas. … Congress may no more regulate the president’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

In Bush’s context, Congress doesn’t matter.  As Rove said, “We create realities.”

This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales’ failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight.

Context.

JMan as been walking around saying “Yo!”. He picked it up from a classmate at school. In the second grade it starts. Oy.

I bought a new Mac and it comes with a program called PhotoBooth. This program uses the computer’s built in camera to take pictures like the photo booths of old. JMan had a lot of fun with it and this is one of his efforts.

Then this, and from where he got it, I don’t know.

But then he got creative.

The PhotoBooth software does not reverse the image, so he had to write that backward for it to appear correct.

Oy.

Yo.

Dana Milbank has yet another story that shows the Bushites for all of their arrogance.

Those wondering why the Bush administration has failed to spread democracy across the globe might find a clue in yesterday’s meeting of the State Department’s “Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.”

About a third of the way through the meeting, and not long after Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky boasted to the television cameras that “our entire session today is open to the public” and attended by the press, State Department officials ordered reporters to leave.

“This is the way they wanted it to happen, and this is the way it’s going to be,” explained department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos. “They seem to have wanted you all out.”

The spokesman declined to say who “they” were. “You got a problem?” Gallegos challenged. “Write a letter.”

I’m countin’ the days until this crew is gone.

Folding at Home is a distributed computing project, similar to the one for SETI, that may actually work.  They are doing first principles chemistry to try to learn how proteins fold.

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Check out the OS stats page and note the comparison between processor types.

It seems like voter suppression was a vital part of the Republican plan in 2004.  Josh Marshall has a post up about it, and more will told later.  The US DoJ was suing the Missouri Secretary of State for not purging voter roles.

[U.S. District Judge Nanette] Laughrey said it was difficult to gauge the scope of the problem “because the United States has not presented the actual voter registration lists and shown who should have been included or excluded and why.”

“It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States,” Laughrey wrote. “Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

Got that?  The DoJ couldn’t show that any fraud had occurred, but they suing anyway.

Just in case any black people decided to actually go out and vote for one of the white candidates.