Via ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society:

Expatica, a newsmagazine for English-speaking expatriates in Germany, reports that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has canceled a trip to Germany out of fear of arrest. Rumsfeld's decision comes on the heels of a complaint filed by the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). According to the CCR:

German law allows German courts to prosecute for killing, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, forcible transfers and sexual coercion such as occurred at Abu Ghraib. The world has seen the photographs and read the leaked "torture memos". We are doing what is necessary when other systems of justice have failed and seeking to hold officials up the chain of command responsible for the shameful abuses that occurred.

Rumsfeld originally planned to attend the Munich Security Conference this February. Attending in his place with be Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith is not among the officials named in the CCR complaint.

I warned that this might happen nearly two years ago.

In one of those misguided online petitions, this one showing support for Think Secret owner Nick Ciarelli in his defense against Apple's lawsuit:

This is a David and Goliath fight, we implore Apple not to use its power against an individual that has so little power with which to defend themself.

1. Of course, independent sentences should be separated by a semicolon or written as separate sentences, not connected with a comma. This isn't what made me roll my eyes.

2. The writer knows that Nick Ciarelli is a man, and there's only one of him, but the pathetic urge to use the plural to avoid either the masculine or feminine pronouns leads him to try themselves. When that doesn't work, rather than use the completely correct himself, he actually invents a new word, themself. Apparently it's the singular version of a plural pronoun, coined to avoid using the gender of an individual whose gender is known.

It was a bad week for English. Even Alton Brown let me down: this week's new episode of Good Eats twice included a text overlay with the four-character non-word alot where he meant a lot. Very, very disappointing.

I've been wondering what the Democrats will do if the wingnuts in the Senate carry through on their threat to go "nuclear" on judicial filibusters, using Vice President Cheney to sustain a rule that filibusters don't apply to judicial nominees, just because they can't get the wingnuttiest of their wingnuts onto lifetime appointments on the federal bench. This comment at MyDD finally explains it:

If the GOP goes nuclear, the Dems have promised they will stop allowing unanimous consent decrees on Congressional Actions. That means things like the text of every piece of legislation read into the record three times, votes cast on the record on every single minor action Congress takes like recessing for the day, congratulating Super Bowl Champs, etc.

Congress grinds to a complete and utter standstill. The GOP could keep Congress open 24/7/365 and still never get anything done.

If they follow through with this, the wingnuts will flood every news program, every talk show, and every free microphone in the land with cries of "obstructionist" and "rule by minority," so we'd better be prepared to show just how awful Bush's filibustered nominees are, and how the GOP used this technique in the Clinton days. That includes when the Majority Leader, Sen. Frist, supported a judicial filibuster, a technique he now decries as "unconstitutional," and then lied about it. Maybe that's why he's chosen not to use the "nuclear option" - for now.

Faux-native cuisine bad for natives? Well, yeah.

At the blog where I saw this, the author added:

Yea, it does. As does all the sweet tea and beans and pop and sweet cakes and commodity macaroni and most everything else characterized as a traditional diet these days. You know, I really wonder sometimes if people understand the extent and virulence of diabetes in Indian communities. I sat at a meeting the other night, for example, where the woman on the right told us her boyfriend's brother had died the day before --- on dialysis, liver shutting down, feet gangrenous and the next step, given how these things go around here, gradual amputation beginning with the feet, then mid-calve, then at the knee and finally all the way to the hip. This man was barely fifty.

On my left, a man on more diabetes drugs and suffering more complications than you can shake a stick at, yet doggedly showing down those beans and whitebread sandwiches and sweet tea and cake.

From the original:

Frybread is bad for you? Well, let's see. It's made with white flour, salt, sugar and lard. The bonus ingredient is dried cow's milk for the large population of Native people who are both glucose and lactose intolerant. [...] Frybread was a gift of Western civilization from the days when Native people were removed from buffalo, elk, deer, salmon, turkey, corn, beans, squash, acorns, fruit, wild rice and other real food.

Frybread is emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations. It's the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death.

If frybread were a movie, it would be hard-core porn. No redeeming qualities. Zero nutrition.

Frybread has replaced "firewater" as the stereotypical Indian staple in movie land. Well-meaning non-Indians take their cues from these portrayals of Indians as simple-minded people who salute the little grease bread and get misty-eyed about it.

"Where's the frybread" is today's social ice-breaker, replacing the decade-long frontrunner, "What did you think of 'Dances with Wolves?'"

(Via Tom Coburn is a Big Fat Jerk.)