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Ed Whelan has apologized for outing Publius. In the end that is good form. It’s hard to admit you are wrong publicly. Doesn’t change what was done but is the best corrective.
Publius has accepted the apology, even better form. He could have certainly decided to reject it since the act cant be outdone but it showed good form to take it and consider the matter dropped.
Good form all around.
The UK Daily Mail reminds us of the reality of what is going on:
This year, it’s been a game of cat and mouse to evade the secret police and the surveillance cameras so we can meet the survivors of the Tiananmen massacre and hear what happened to them.
It shouldn’t be. Last year, the Chinese announced during the Olympics that foreign journalists would be free to work anywhere in the country – they needed only to apply for a ‘ journalist visa’.
We applied – as a BBC documentary team – but heard nothing for months. Our only option was to travel on a tourist visa.
Just beyond the border crossing at Shenzhen, policemen shouted, yelped into their radios and waved white-gloved hands in the camera lens: clearly, old habits die hard.
Arriving at our hotel in Chengdu in western China, I spotted a man beetling through the front door towards us, talking into his radio. A friendly porter? No, he interrogated our driver about our plans.
The next day I realised that the authorities were going to be really persistent when two plainclothes policemen popped up in the middle of a field of brilliant yellow rapeseed, focusing their binoculars on us from just a hundred yards away.
China can pretend that this never happened and can repress any who wish to talk about it, however the fact that China is a bloody repressive state is a fact and until the day comes when China acknowledges that this will be so.
Well its been a few weeks now since everybody told us that Dick Cheney out front was a bad idea, lets see how that’s worked out
Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantanamo shouldn’t be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states.
There is only one conclusion to make
…when president Bush was in charge:
Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
Is there a chance that this kid is actually connected to the bad guys? Its not impossible or is it likely that he is being hacked? I don’t know but something smells.
Boyce said the Patriot Act was written with good intentions, but he said he believes it has gone too far in some cases. Lundeby’s might be one of them, he said.
“It very well could be a case of overreaction, where an agent leaped to certain conclusions or has made certain assumptions about this individual and about how serious the threat really is,” Boyce said.
Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. The North Carolina Highway Patrol did confirm that officers assisted with the FBI operation at the Lundeby home on March 5.
“Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from,” Lundeby said. “This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”
As Classical Values from where I found the story says:
I think it’s time to reexamine or repeal the Patriot Act. Otherwise, because it is in the nature of power that those who have power will abuse it, we will only see more stories like this.
My gut says you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, a single bad application doesn’t make a law bad. The judge would have to be a real d*** to be covering up for a bad prosecution but it’s not impossible. If these guys are pulling BS to cover their rear ends they need to be nailed bad. The real point is this:
Don’t pass a law that you don’t trust your political opponents to enforce since eventually they are going to be in power. I’d like to think that the Obama administration can be trusted to enforce the laws fairly. I really would.
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