In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, Mousa Abu Marzook, a political spokesman for Hamas, explains their victory in the recent elections. Can we take this seriously?

Alleviating the debilitative conditions of occupation, and not an Islamic state, is at the heart of our mandate (with reform and change as its lifeblood).

A new breed of Islamic leadership is ready to put into practice faith-based principles in a setting of tolerance and unity.

We do desire dialogue.

The Post describes the author thusly:

The writer is deputy political bureau chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He has a U.S. doctorate in engineering and was indicted in the United States in 2004 as a co-conspirator on racketeering and money-laundering charges in connection with activities on behalf of Hamas dating to the early 1990s, before the organization was placed on the list of terrorist groups. He was deported to Jordan in 1997.

Note, as well, that "Paradise Now" has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

What Hamas Is Seeking

Check it out… It pumps propane and pure oxygen into the gopher holes for about 5 minutes… and then let's a spark go and all the gopher holes blow up, killing all the gophers!

OMFG thats awesome!

Boing Boing: Help Richard blow up his gophers with a $1295 explosive system

Chinese Google filter only works if you can spell

For future reference...

In what might resemble a horrifying moment in a science fiction film, astronauts aboard the International Space Station will toss an empty spacesuit overboard next week.

The Russian suit will carry three batteries and a ham radio transmitter and antenna. Amateur radio operators on Earth will be able to listen to its transmissions over several days until the batteries fail.

Um, yeah. Sure.

An Orbiting Spacesuit With Transmitter

Here is a spoofed email that appears to come from you and is digitally signed. Note that I signed up using another person's email address, another person's SSN, another person's phone number, chose your name as the password for the key, etc.

Both MS and Apple need a beating with a clue stick.

U:Apparently they got it... MS at least fixed this.

Jon Udell: How to forge an S/MIME signature

Kerry, Clinton, and Kennedy are now "blogging" on the Daily Kos.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Kerry & Kos

Washington has been in a furor over the National Security Agency's wiretapping, particularly President Bush's assertion that he has the executive authority to order the program, but scholars disagree over whether he is on solid legal ground.

U Sorry, this comes from the Washington Times. I guess that means I still haven't seen an independent legal analysis that supports the President's perspective. If you've got one, lemme know.

Some references to independent lawyers who support the President's perspective on NSA wiretapping...

I've read some of the cases Hewitt references in this discussion, and some of his positions are totally irrational... JA raises the crux that this issue places conservatives in... Are you really a strict constructionalist when it means sacrificing your own power to make war?

HH: Okay, just for the benefit of the audience, the Truong Court, as did all other courts that have decided the issue, held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence information. We take for granted that the president does have that authority, and asserting that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president's Constitutional authority. So I mean, you can argue that, but it's just simply wrong, Jonathan....

JA: ... Look, this is a basic question of whether one is a traditional, a limited government conservative who believes in James Madison, and what an originalist, what the founders wanted, or whether one's an authority conservative. Now I know you're an authority conservative. It's the difference between a Goldwater conservative and a Nixon conservative. And I know you're in the latter camp. But for you to deny that there's a kind of philosophical distinction here, it cuts very deep. I was at the Cato Institute in Washington on Monday, interviewing them. They are more upset about this than I am.

Rumblings of the conservative backlash I harkened?

In this book, Somit and Peterson argue that humans are social primates with an innate tendency for hierarchical and authoritarian social and political structures, and that democracy requires very special "enabling conditions" before it can be supported by a state, conditions that require decades to evolve. As a result, attempts to export democracy through nation-building to states without these enabling conditions are doomed to failure.

The Failure of Democratic Nation Building

Bush, whose aides said they consider the issue a clear political winner, is resurrecting tactics from the last campaign to make the NSA spying program a referendum on which party will keep the United States safe from terrorists. He has dispatched top White House officials almost daily to defend the program and has sent a message to party activists that he considers fighting terrorism with tools such as NSA eavesdropping the defining issue of the November elections

Worth reading. Troublesome.

The story here is not whether or not it ought to be authorized but whether or not is was authorized. Almost no one understands this distinction. The Republican talking points are:
1. Its legal.
2. Its needed to defend America.
3. People raising questions about its legality are partisan hacks who don't care about the safety of the American people.

The problem is that its probably not legal. I haven't seen a legal analysis coming from outside the administration that jives with the position of the administration. But the common man is not going to understand subtle Constitutional questions. The Democrats have to fight this fight, because its a basic separation of power issue. They can't just leave it on the floor. However, they are going to loose the political dialog because you really have to think about this in order to understand it, and most people are incapable of doing that, and many who aren't are partisan enough to be unwilling to do it objectively. If the Republicans loose in court they are likely to be able to spin that its another example of judicial activism and the ACLU hates America, etc...

What it really comes down to is the honesty of the Republican Party at large. They are being told, via this message, to tow the line on this. They are trapped in a position where if they disagree on this issue they must risk the support of the party and their political chances in November in order to take a stand. This issue will not fly if enough Republicans take a stand on it, but its going to be a very, very difficult decision for them to make (which is why Rove is putting the above sort of pressure on them).

On the balance is the entire idea of the rule of law. If the President can simply violate the law at will, argue that the court system is biased, and pressure the legislature into towing the line for political reasons, there effectively is no law. Or, in particular, there is no law with regard to minority interests. As long as the President is capable of garnering popular support for something it can be pursued irrespective of the checks and balances in our system.

The Miers nomination demonstrated that the Conservative legal community is capable of fighting the President when it wants to. This is a time and place where it ought to. We'll see if it has the guts. If it doesn't, we'll have slipped quite far down the slope toward an unravelling of the rule of law...

Rift Between Parties Over NSA Wiretapping Grows