DanKohn.com

I consider myself vaguely flattered to be called Stalinist by as big a name as Cory Doctorow. Amusingly, his boingboing blog that led to the quicktopic, also includes this tale, which sounds slightly more Stalinist. Just to be clear, this is all about Habeas, which is the new Skymoon company I co-founded with CEO Anne Mitchell.

Geekcorps volunteers in Ghana.

Paul Krugman on CEO’s being overpaid (note the great phrase “outrage constraint”). Jeff Bezos gave a fantastic closing speech at the PFF Aspen conference Tuesday where he pointed out that the markets are way too effective at processing information to be deceived by whether stock options are expensed or not. So, one might as well expense them. Here’s the paper Krugman refers to.

The NYT reports on “A Washington Must: Embassies With lan“. I believe Rome was like this just before it fell to the barbarians.

In this hilarious Reuters picture, President Bush and his wife Laura are stepped on by the giant Republican opposition to his war plans. It is quite difficult to get such a picture in focus.

Dowd has an excellent article on Bush family psychodynamics:

[Bush 41's] proudest legacy, after all, was painstakingly stitching together a global coalition to stand up for the principle that one country cannot simply invade another without provocation. Now the son may blow off the coalition so he can invade a country without provocation.

Irving Kristol writes in the upcoming Weekly Standard that Mr. Scowcroft and Mr. Powell are “appeasers” who “hate the idea of a morally grounded foreign policy that seeks aggressively and unapologetically to advance American principles around the world.”

What does that make the old man? The Chamberlain of Kennebunkport?

Who needs a war plan? We need family therapy.

I actually agree with Kristol that “European international-law wishfulness and full-blown Pat Buchanan isolationism are the two intellectually honest alternatives to the Bush Doctrine.” I may be one of the few Americans who support both the ICC and pre-emptive action against Iraq.

AO Scott in the NYT likes the new “summer guilty-pleasure movie about surfing”, “Blue Crush”:

But still, it’s hard to resist being swept up in “Blue Crush,” not least because David Hennings’s shimmery photography carries the breeze and spray of the island right into the theater. The movie is also the latest example of a subgenre that might be called feminexploitation. (Earlier examples include “Bring It On” and “Charlie’s Angels.”) The idea is to find heroines who are strong, tough, capable and resilient, but who also look fabulous in bathing suits and other revealing attire. The audience appeal is theoretically universal. You can ogle Anne Marie and her friends or you can aspire to be just like them, or even a little of both. Whatever gets you stoked, dude.

And it also includes this zinger of a movie reference: “The romance that follows is basically that of a gender-reversed ‘Dirty Dancing’: Anne Marie gives Matt surfing lessons (for which he overpays her) and begins to worry that he is using her.”

Nerve magazine on infidelity: “Marriage, according to Brandt, follows a four-to-five-year curve of Infatuation, Attachment, Disillusion and Dissolution…. We don’t need a how-to book on being bad better. We need the guilt, the mystery, the corrosion of our heart and its rebirth.”

If you don’t know the name Yaser Esam Hamdi, you soon will. He was in court today to determine whether the right of Habeas Corpus, first granted to a few English nobles in the fields of Runnymede in 1215 and guaranteed by the constitution to all US citizens, will now be taken away by the Bush Administration’s cavalier definition of an :”enemy combatant”. The NYT reports on the federal judiciary playing their role as one of the main bulwarks of liberty:

“I have no desire to have an enemy combatant get out,” the judge said. “But due process requires something other than a declaration by someone named Mobbs that he should be held incommunicado. Isn’t that what we’re fighting for?”

The Bush Administration, and especially every single Justice Department lawyer who taken part in this case, should be ashamed. History will look on them exactly as we do on the Japanese internments.

Fascinating Kristof column on whether Stephen Hatfill is the anthrax mailer.

Why did it take nine months to call in the bloodhounds, or to read Dr. Hatfill’s unpublished novel, “Emergence,” which has been sitting in the copyright office since 1998 and draws on his experiences in South Africa and Antarctica to recount a biological warfare attack on Congress?

I couldn’t agree more with Kritof’s focus on both presumption of innocence and getting to the truth.