No one has to stay in a tornado shelter for very long; they don’t require food, beds, or plumbing. There should be publicly available shelters all over towns and cities in this region

No, you’re not. I posted before seeing your comment.

Living as I do far from what is considered tornado country (although a small but damaging one did touch down only a mile or two from my home a few years ago), I may not understand the magnitude of the task, but if we were a better governed country, and states like Oklahoma and Kansas had officials with priorities other than tormenting birth control and abortion providers and keeping classrooms science-free, couldn’t we do much more to minimize tornado deaths?

Carbon dioxide, actually. Carbon monoxide is different.

Apologies if this got mentioned above and I missed it, but this is the second punch in a one-two combination this week after telecom executive Tom Wheeler was named to chair the FCC. I love the talking point on that one: Wheeler has been in industry so long, that he will be too old to complete the revolving-door round trip back to the private sector when he is done at the FCC. So comforting!

The Feds already get almost all the corporate compliance on surveillance they could wish for. It’s that “almost” that makes steam come out of their ears, and leads to proposals like this to definitively crush those oddball companies, like Twitter, relatively inclined to stand up for their customers.

Recall that the only telecom to resist Bush’s unambiguously illegal wiretaps, Qwest, faced retaliation, such as its CEO being prosecuted for insider trading, while those that complied were favored by Congress (including Sen. Obama) with retroactive immunity for their lawbreaking.

So its not as if, if this legislation doesn’t pass, the government won’t still be able to get virtually everything it wants about you just by asking. But of course it’ll pass anyway.

Thanks, Kevin.

But I hope Scahill is certain he is not putting Manning in any additional legal jeopardy with this disclosure. Depending on what orders Manning was operating under, I think such a contact could still be a criminal breach of military discipline, even absent turning over any documents or classified information.

Great post; great comments. Godawful mayor-for-(it already seems like)-eternity.

From where I am presently sitting, I could run to the Yonkers city line in half an hour if I had to. Always have an escape route handy.

The pattern ever since Bush Jr. took office has been to try to take pre-existing, supposedly ltightly constrained exceptions to the regular rules that limit the state’s powers and protect individuals, and ream them these little holes out so thoroughly that the exceptions grow to dominate the rules.

Just off the top of my head: illegal enemy combatants (vis a vis Geneva Conventions), national security letters, material witness statute, executive signing statements, AUMF, reclassification of released documents, state-secrets privilege.

Now, Miranda’s public safety “exception” is going to swallow Miranda.

In this discussion, it is important to keep two, somewhat opposite points in mind: first, what Miranda is; and second, what Miranda signifies as a political football to Sen. Graham, Rep. King, et al.

What Miranda is is a rule potentially barring the use of a defendant’s own statements against her/him in a criminal trial. Simply that. Miranda does not legally prevent the authorities from asking questions of whomever they want, whenever and wherever they want, though it can keep statements elicited in violation of the warnings requirement out of court. Miranda similarly does not itself confer a right to remain silent, which exists to the same extent whether or not the warnings are given.

But how much, do you think, does the foregoing have to do with the way this issue is being used by politicians and the media at this time?

Does anybody really believe Peter King is primarily interested in the rules of evidence at trial, when he would be happy if a rapid transfer of this accused bomber to military custody and a flight to Guantanamo, followed by the now well-worn routines of torture, meant there were to be no trial at all?

Is Lindsay Graham really only opposed to the right to be warned of the right to remain silent (Miranda), but still devoted to this accused’s underlying Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination?

No, these distinctions have no currency in today’s bleating about whether Miranda should apply in this case, and that is because what Miranda signifies here is the rule of law itself.

By delegitimizing Miranda as irrelevant, outdated, and quaint (to use the Bush gang’s word when engaged in a similar effort with respect to the Geneva Conventions), King, Graham, and, in slightly more genteel form, Holder and Obama, are attempting to make use of a brutalized public’s impatience with the politically vulnerable packaging of a certified “bleeding-heart, liberal” rule like Miranda to make further huge inroads in what remains of the rule of law, due process, and basic rights of the individual against the state.

If Dean wants to get on the right side now, that’s delightful, but please keep in mind that he has been merrily feeding at the Beltway Dem trough for several years now.

Rather than a simple, naked reversal on vetoing this bill on the merits, isn’t a more likely scenario that CISPA gets bound up somehow with something that absolutely has to pass tonight or the world will end [scary crash chords], like averting a government shutdown, debt ceiling stuff, military-terror funding, or the like?

Nicholas Kristof tweeted exactly this observation, and then felt he had to retract it. The right wing remains proficient at working the refs.

Seems like a reasonable point to make: if the Republican extremists who populate Congress these days dedicate themselves to making government non-functional, as they do, then we can expect a less capable government.

I wouldn’t!

Media fearmongering about North Korea is characterized by an odd doublethink, which is also to be found in this post: we are supposed to be simultaneously amused by the North Koreans’ supposed technological backwardness and incompetence (“it didn’t go well”), and terrified by their potent threat (“North Korea seems to have successfully gotten to that point”).

A recovered missile component is potentially very good intelligence. Maybe it has revealed a design specifically meant to carry a nuclear warhead, as DIA asserts, or maybe that analysis is of the “anodized aluminum tubes” variety of a decade ago. I don’t know, though the quoted language is slippery: “building the missile’s cone at dimensions for a nuclear warhead”. What does that mean, beyond the tautology that a warhead designed to fit in that cone would fit in that cone?

In any case, I would point out that even if the missile has been designed to carry a nuclear warhead, that does not reveal whether such warhead miniaturization has in fact been achieved, contrary to what our propaganda machine seems to want to make us believe.

Spoken like a decent person, but we’re up against people with no such scruples. As with Reagan, the burnishers of predatory capitalism have not and, if up to them, will not let the opportunity pass to sanctify Thatcher and her politics. They’re counting on decent people being unwilling to fight them on their own dirty terms.

If protestors were planning on disrupting an appropriately scaled ceremony, it might be a closer call. But this is going to be virtually a state funeral in all but name, like what Winston Churchill and Princess Diana got. Other important UK Prime Ministers, who didn’t have Churchill’s unique trans-partisan status as the man who led the nation through WWII, have received no such sendoffs.

It is the current government and Thatcher’s family who have abandoned tradition with this presidential/royal/military apotheosis gambit, and thereby made the event absolutely fair game for citizens who still hope for a better future for their country.