Gen. Janis Karpinski has been busted to colonel but not because of Abu Ghraib. According to an article by Lee Worden, the Army’s report says specifically:

“Though Brig. Gen. Karpinski’s performance of duty was found to be seriously lacking,” the summary said, “the investigation team determined that no action or lack of action on her part contributed specifically to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

So, somehow a woman has taken the fall in way that enables us to continue to deny systemic responsibility. If Kafka hadn’t died so young, he would have had the opportunity to die laughing.

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An Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, looked under the blacked out marks on a US gov’t PDF and discovered that there are an average of 25 attacks a day on coalition forces in Iraq. See Paolo Valdemarin’s bloggage of this. [Technorati tag: iraq]

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Eric Norlin points out that Congress is about to pass a national ID law, although it’s in the guise of mandated guidelines for state drivers licenses. The legislation is attached to a big Iraq bill, so it will go through without any discussion.

Is it the end of democracy? Nah. But totalitarianism comes in on little cat feet, one rational step at a time.

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Andrew, who has been a force for good in bring the Net and the Net ethos to conventional political campaigns, is running for Public Advocate in NYC. His first interview as a candidate is in NY Magazine. He’s financing his campaign with no donation larger than $100. (NY has a quintuple matching fund if you’re a NYC resident.) Let’s help get this guy into this semi-obscure position in NYC because he’ll do some totally non-obscure things with it.

[Disclosure: I’ve met him and talked with him a few times. I got paid a couple hundred dollars by a site that he’s funding, Personal Democracy Forum. I even know how to pronounce his name.]

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Andrew Rasiej is running for Public Advocate of NYC. He would transform this position into a true voice of the people…not to mention that he’ll do very cool things with the Net. Heck, his theme is “A New Campaign to Reconnect New York.”

You can sign up here. And here’s the campaign’s blog.

Go Andrew! [Technorati tags: AndrewRasiej politics]

I should have mentioned not only have I met Andrew a few times, for a couple of months I was on the payroll of Personal Democracy Forum (to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars total), which Andrew generously bankrolls. Sorry for the lapse, but I promise you that my enthusiasm for his candidacy is based on knowing something about him and not on the money that changed hands.

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The Republican National Committee is pushing a podcast of Bob Dole talking about his new memoir, One Soldier’s Story, part of a series on “new books by accomplished conservative authors.”

When I was a kid and there were still liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller, the joke about conservatives such as Barry Goldwater was that their idea of progress was putting an AM radio into their buggies. Haha.

People were making the same joke about Ronald Reagan. But you sure can’t make that joke now.

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Michael Bassik at Personal Democracy Forum finds it distubring that Sen. Bill Frist was able to diagnosis Terri Schiavo on the basis of a video of her. So, Michael suggests that we upload photos to flickr of our medical conditions — “tennis elbow, acne, runny nose, hemorrhoids, or whatever ails you” — and tag them “Frist” so the good doctor can diagnose us as well.

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Diana Schaub is against cloning in part because of what she’s learned watching Star Trek, which is, basically, that death is a part of the great circle of life:

The show has “left me receptive to the view that mortality is, if not precisely a good thing, then at least the necessary foundation of other very good things,” she wrote in an article last year. “There is something misguided about the attempt to overcome mortality.”

…”Both Lincoln and the Enterprise argue that there ought to be certain moral limits to the scientific project, and they help us articulate what those limits are.”

…Cloning is an evil,” she wrote in an article published in 2003. “It is slavery, plus abortion.”

This would be mildly loony and uninteresting except that she’s on the President’s Council on Bioethics, which advises President Bush.

[Thanks to Andrew McLaughlin for the link.]

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Joi wonders if the world has gotten more democratic since 9/11, a topic discussed at the Atocha memorial forum.

Tough question. I think I’d say: More democracies, less democratic. More voting, less liberty.

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Bob Frankston talks about two important Supreme Court cases coming up — Grokster and Brand X — with an emphasis on the latter. In Brand X, as I understand it, an ISP sued because it was denied access to a cable company’s broadband lines. At stake is whether cable companies, granted munipal monopolies or near-monopolies, will be able to create walled gardens. (Bob provides an excellent set of links so you can read it about it on your own and correct my misrepresentation.)

Bob notes elsewhere that these cases are well-timed for discussion at David Isenberg’s Freedom2Connect. (I’m speaking at it and, yes, I feel good about plugging it. It’s not a product placement if you mean it and you’re not getting paid for it.) [Technorati tags: frankston f2c brandx]

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